
("lass 
Hook 



IV ALT Whitman 



BY 



RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE, M. D. 

Author of " Man's Moral Nature." 



PUBLISHED BY 

DAVID McKAY, 23 South Ninth Street 

PHILADELPHIA 

1883 



^frlA/W. 3 



7^532 31 
C <r{^3 



Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1883, liy Wii.i.iam U. 
O'CoNNUK, in the oliice of the Librarian of Congress, at Wash- 
ington. 






CONTENTS. 



PAG us 

INTRODUCTION, 7 

Chronological Forecast o' W. W.'s Life, and the Successive Publi- 
cations of Leaves of Grass, ...... 8 10 



PART I. 



CAapHer I— BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Excerpt from W. W. — Personal History of Authors, . . .12 
List of the Whitman Family, . . . . , . • '3 

Remote Ancestry of W. W., ........ 14 

On the Mother's Side, 15 

Immediate Ancestry, . . . . . . . . .16 

Plollandic Elements, . 17 

Brooklyn and New York Training, . . . . . -19 

A Happy and Free Life, i835-'45, , . . . . .21 

i847-'49 — Jaunt to Louisiana, 23 

1850 to 1855, 25 

Letter from Helen I'rice, ........ 26 32 

Letter from Thomas Gere, ........ 33 

The Secession Outbreak. — First Fredericksburg, . . . -34 
War's Darkest Times, ......... 35 

Letter from John Swinton, ........ 36 

Letter from G. S. McWatters 37 

Letter by W. W., from Washington, 1863, 38 40 

An Occurrence in 1865, ........ 41 

Pen-Portraits of W. W.— 1864-72, 42 — 44 

A Paralytic Stroke 45 

Illness of i873-'4-'5, 47 

(3) 



Contents. 



PAGES 

Chapter II.— THE POET IN 1880.— PERSONNEL, Etc. 

Face. — Senses. — Physique, ........ 49 

Dress. — Ideal of Life. — Temper, 51 

Singing. — Reciting Poetry, ........ 53 

His Fondness for Children, ........ 55 

After the Rest, a Repellent Side, 57 

Chapter III— HIS CONVERSATION, 59 70 

APPENDIX TO PART I 

Excerpt from Letter, Mobile, Ala., 72 

Introductory Letter, 1883 73 98 

"The Good Gray Poet." (1865-6.) 99 — 130 

Two Subsequent Letters, ........ 130 — 132 



PART n. 

Chapter I.— HISTORY OF LEAVES OF GRASS. 

The Successive Editions, from 1855 to 1882, .... I35 — 147 

The Attempted Official Suppression 149 — 151 

Completed Works, 1882-83 153 

Chapter II.— ANAL YSIS OF POEMS, Etc. 

His Poetic and Prose Lessons, . . . . . . -155 

His Rhythmic Interior, 157 

His Central Poem, 159 

Backgrounds of Meaning, l6l 

The Theme of Sexuality, 163' 

J. B. Marvin's Criticism, . . . . . . . .165 

A Manly Friendship, Sane, Heroic, Passionate, . . . .167 

W. W.'s Self-Drawn Portrait, i860, 169 

Emotional Element of " Drum-Taps," ..... 171 

" Prayer of Columbus," . . . . . . . '173 

Chapter III— ANAL YSIS OF POEMS, Continued. 

Difficulty of Understanding L. of G., ...... 175 — 176 

The Poems " A Picture, of the World as Seen from the Stand- 
point of the Highest Moral Elevation," .... 178 

The herald of a New Religious Era, . ..... 1S3 

" The Bible of Democracy," 185 

Exalt the Commonest Life, . . . . . , 187 

A Thought, Reading the Biblic Poems, 189 



Contents. 



APPENDIX TO PART II.— CONTEMPORANEOUS 

CRITICISMS, Etc., 183S-1S83. 
Initials and Outlines, Brooklyn, 1855, 
1856, Emerson to Carlyle, '. 
The " Imprints " of i860, . 
A Boston Critic " At a Loss," 
Criticism by Freiligrath (German), 
Letter of Mrs. Gilchrist, England 
A French Literary Opinion, 
From " Matador," New York, 
Idealism of Leaves of Grass, 
Poets' Tributes, . 
Arran Leigh, England, 
A Tourist's Interview, 
Frank W. Walters, England, 
Jaunt to the Rocky Mountains, 1879, 
Visit to Long Island Birthplace, 1S81, 
" Whenever the 14th of April Comes,' 
" Three Figures for Posterity," 
A Comment on the 1882 Suppression, 
George Chainey's Chicago Lecture, 
W. W.'s Late Illness, . 
W. Sloane Kennedy's Criticism, . 
" An Autobiography After its Sort," 
American Freethought and Freethinkers, 
Sonnet to W. W. by Robert Buchanan, 



-206 



195 

197 

199 

201 

202 

204- 

207 

209 

211 

213 

215 

217 

219 — 221 

221 

223 

225 

227 

229 

231 

232 

233 

235 

235 

236 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Frontispiece. — Portrait of Walt Whitman, from Life, in 1864. Photo- 
Intaglio. Drawn by Herbert H. Gilchrist, England. 

Facing Page 13. — House at West Hills in which W. W. was born. 
Drawn by Joseph Pennell. Eng. by Photo Eng. Co., N. Y. 

Facing Page 15. — Ancient Burial Ground of the Van Velsors at 
Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., on the Homestead Farm. Drawn by Pen- 
nell. Eng. by P. E. Co., N. Y. 

Facing Page 17. — Ancient Burial Ground of the Whitmans at West 
Hills, L. I., on the Homestead Farm. Drawn by Pennell. Eng. by 
P. E. Co., N. Y. 

Facing Page 26. — Portrait from Life of Walter Whitman, the 
Poet's Father. 

Facing Page 46. — Portrait from Life of Louisa (Van Velsor) Whit- 
man, the Poet's Mother. 

Facing Page 48. — Portrait from Life of Walt Whitman in 1880. 
Photo by Edy Bro.'s, London, Canada. 

Facing Page 54. — W. W.'s Handwriting. Fac-simile. 

(6) 



INTRODUCTION. 

Now just entering his sixty-fifth year, Walt Whitman has become the 
object, in America and Europe, of such pronounced attacks, defences, in- 
quiries, and of comments, assumptions, and denials, so various and incon- 
sistent — with a certainty of steadily increasing interest, perhaps of still more 
pronounced attack and defence in the future — that a field may well be pre- 
sumed to exist for statements about him from observation at first hand. 
Such contemporaneous statements, executed in their own way, form the purpose 
of the following pages. To arrest, at the time, some otherwise evanescent 
facts and features of the man — to sketch him on the spot, in his habit as he 
lived, and give a few authentic items of his ancestry, youth, middle life, and 
actual manners and talk, is the primary object of this volume ; secondly, 
to put forth in regard to Leaves of Grass my own deliberate constructions 
of that work. I make no pretence that they are other than from a friendly 
point of view. " As it seems to me," might doubtless have served as heading 
for all I have written. 

To balance, however, any proclivity, or danger of proclivity, in that direc- 
tion, I have freely included in my book (Appendix, Part II.) the fullest rep- 
resentation from the enemies and most outspoken fault-findings and denuncia- 
tions of Leaves of Grass and their author. I know that the poet himself 
welcomes such searching attacks and trials. He has told me that he considers 
them the means whereby Nature and Fate try the right of any thing or ambi- 
tion, book or what-not, to exist. " If my light can't stand such gales," he 
once said to me, " let it go out — as it will then deserve to go out." 

In short, and while I have no final authority to speak for Walt Whitman 
(who has himself more opposed than favored my enterprise), I do not hesitate 
to send forth the following pages, not only as the bona fide results of my 
own knowledge of the poet and study of his writings for many years past, but 
as direct testimony from the days and actualities among which he lives, and 
certainly representing the last feeling and verdict of persons (I have had cor- 
respondence or face-to-face meetings with many of them), who have been 
closest and longest in contact with him. 

William D. O'Connor's " Good Gray Poet," of i865-'6, and, after eighteen 
years, his letter now written (1883), in confirmation and re-statement of that 
pamphlet, occupy a considerable part of the ensuing volume ; but they are both 
in courteous response to my solicitations, and will prove invaluable contributions 
to the future. They come from a scholar who has absorbed to its very depths 

(7) 



8 Introdjiction. 

the literature of the Elizabethan age, as illustrated by Shakespeare and Bacon 
— an ardent familiar of the great geniuses of all times — and a personal 
knower of Walt Whitman's life for the last twenty-five years. The judgments 
such a man, after such opportunities, has to announce, deserve, indeed, to be 
recorded. 

Walt Wliitman said not long since to a friend that he did not want his life 
written, that he did not care in any way to lie ditTerentiated from the common 
people, of whom he was one. " Then," said his friend, " why did you dif- 
ferentiate yourself from ordinary men by writing Leaves of Grass .?" Accord- 
ing to the poet himself, he has lived a common life ; and this is true, not in 
the sense that it has been like other lives, but that other lives in future are to 
be like it, and that his life is to be the common property of humanity. For 
this man, who has absorbed the whole human race, will, in the future, in turn, 
be absorbed by each individual member of the race who aspires to attain com- 
plete spiritual growth. 

The claim made throughout the present work, both in that First Part of it 
which deals with the man Walt Whitman, and in the Second, which deals 
with the book Leaves of Grass, is, that the leading fact in both, the one as 
much as the other, is moral elevation ; that this is their basic meaning and 
value to us. The true introduction, therefore, to this volume, is the author's 
previous work, " Man's Moral Nature."* In that book he has discussed the 
moral nature in the abstract, pointed out its physical basis, and shown its his- 
toric development; while the sole object of the present work is to depict an 
individual moral nature, perhaps the highest that has yet appeared. 

And now, before entering on the various subjects attempted and more fully 
detailed in my volume,, it will essentially serve the reader to run his or her 
eyes over an authentic and brief 

Chronological forecast o/Y\'^alt Whitman's /rfe, and the successive 
publications ^Leaves of Grass. 

1819. Born at West Hills — (see Specimen Days). 

1820, '21, '22, and early half of '23. At West Hills. 
l823-'24. In Brooklyn, in Front street. 

iS25-'3o. In Cranberry, Johnson, Tillary, and Henry streets. Went to 

public schools. 
i83i-'32. Tended in a lawyer's office; then, a doctor's. 
i833-'34. In printing offices, learning the trade. 

l836-'37. Teaching country schools on Long Island. " Boarded round." 
l840-'45. In New York city, printing, etc. Summers in the country. Some 

farm-work. 

* "Man's Moral Nature, an Essay." G. P. Putnam's Sons: N.Y., 1879. 



Introduction. 9 

l846-'47. In Brooklyn, editing daily paper, the " Eagle." 

i848-'49. In New Orleans, on editorial staff of daily paper, the " Crescent." 

" i848-'49. About this time went off on a leisurely journey and working expedition (my 
brother Jeff with me) through all the Middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi 
Rivers. Lived a while in New Orleans, and worked there. After a time, plodded back 
northward, up the Mississippi, the Missouri, etc., and around to, and by way of, the great 
lakes, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, to Niagara Falls and Lower Canada — finally returning 
through Central New York, and down the Hudson." — Personal Notes, W. W, 

1850. Publishing " The Freeman " newspaper in Brooklyn. 

185 1, '52, '53, '54, Carpentering — building houses in Brooklyn, and selling 
them. 

l855' First issue of Leaves of Grass. Small quarto, 94 pages. Eight or 

nine hundred copies printed. No sale. 
1 856. Second issue of Leaves of Grass. Small l dmo., 384 pages — 32 poems — 

published by Fowler ^ Wells, 308 Broadway, New York. Little or no 

sale. 
i860. Third issue of Leaves of Grass, d^^^d pages, l2mo., published by Thayer 

(&^ Eldridge, I16 Washington Street, Boston. 
1862. W. W. leaves Brooklyn and New York permanently. Goes down to 

the field of war. Winters partly in Army of the Potomac, camped along 

the Rappahannock, Virginia. Begins his ministrations to the wounded. 
l863-'64. In the field, and among the army hospitals — (see Specimen Days). 

1865. At Washington City, as government clerk. 

1866. Prints "Drum Taps" and "Sequel to Drum Taps," poems written 
during the war, " President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn," and other pieces. 
96 pages, i2mo. Washington. No publisher's name. 

1867. Fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, ^'^Z pages, izmo. The poems now 
begin the order and classification eventually settled upon. New York. No 
publisher'' s name. 

1868. '69, '70. Employed in Attorney-General's Department, Washington. 
1871. Delivers " After all, not to Create only," (" Song of the Exposition "), 

at the opening of the American Institute, New York. 

1871. Fifth issue of Leaves of Grass, ■^^^ pages, and Passage to India, 120 
pages, both in one volume, i2mo. Washington, D. C. Includes Drum 

Taps, Marches now the War is over, etc. A handsome edition. 

1872. Delivers " As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," at the commencement, 
Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H. (now, in i8S2-'83 edition, entitled 
" Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood.") 

"1872. Took a two months' trip through the New England States, up the ConEccticut val- 
ley, Vermont, the Adirondacks region— and to Burlington, to see my dear sister Hannah 
once more. Returning, had a pleasant day-trip down Lake Champlain — and, the next 
day, down the Hudson." — Notes. 

1873. Opening of this year, W. W. prostrated by paralysis, at Washington. 
Loses his mother by death. 



lO Introduction. 

i874-'75. Living in Camden, New Jersey, disabled and ill. 

1876. Sixth or Ceniennial issue of Leaves of Grass {printed from the plates 

of the fifth, 1871, edition). Also another volume, Two Rivulets, composed 

of prose and poems alternately. 
l877-'78. Health and strength now moderately improving. 

1879. Journeys west to Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, etc. (see Specimen Days). 

1880. Journeys to Canada, and summers there. 

1 88 1. Seventh issue of Leaves of Grass, J82 pages, 12 mo. James R. Osgood 
6^ Co., Boston. Six months after issue, J. R. Osgood ^^ Co. are threatened 
-ivith prosecution by Massachusetts District Attorney Stevens, and abandon 
the publication. 

1 882-' 83. Eighth and f flat edition of Leaves of Grass, from same plates as 
1881, Boston, edition, with last touches and corrections of the author, con- 
taining all the poems from frst to last — two hundred and ninety-three — 
printed wider W. IV.'s direct stipervision. Published by David McKay, 
23 South Ninth Street, Philadelphia (formerly Rees Welsh &' Co.). 

l882-'83. Prose writings, autobiography, etc., entitled Specimen Days and 
Collect. The author's parentage, early clays on Long Island, and young 
fuanhood in Nero York city. Three years^ experience in the Secession 
War, especially the army hospitals. Convalescent notes afterward. Also, 
some literary criticisms, and jaunts west and north. The latter part, Col- 
lect, includes Democratic Vistas, the successive Prefaces of Leaves of 
■ Grass, with many notes, and prose compositions of various years. 374 
pages, i2tno. Published by David McKay, 23 South Ninth Street, Phila- 
delfhia. 



PART I. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

THE POET IN I'^Zo— PERSONNEL. 

HIS CONVERSATION 

APPENDIX — The Good Gray Poet, reprinted from the 
Pamphlet of 1866, with an Introductory Letter (1883), 
written for this Volume by William D. O'Connor. 



If Taine, the French critic, had done no other good, it would be enough 
that he has brought to the fore the first, last, and all-illuminating point, with 
respect to any grand production of literature, that the only way to finally un- 
derstand it is to minutely study the personality of the one who shaped it — his 
origin, times, surroundings, and his actual fortunes, life, and ways. All this 
supplies not only the glass through which to look, but it is the atmosphere, 
the very light itself. Who can profoundly get at Byron or Burns without such 
help? Would I apply the rule to Shakespeare? Yes, unhesitatingly; the 
plays of the great poet are not only the concentration of all that lambently 
played in the best fancies of those times — not only the gathering sunset of the 
stirring days of feudalism, but the particular life that the poet led, Ihe kind of 
man he was, and what his individual experience absorbed. I don't wonder 
the theory is broached that other brains and fingers (Bacon's, Raleigh's, and 
more) had to do with the Shakespearian work — planned main parts of it, and 
built it. The singular absence of information about the person Shakespeare 
leaves unsolved many a riddle, and prevents the last and dearest descriptive 
touches and dicta of criticism. 

Walt Whitman in " The Critic," Dec. 3d, 1881. 

(12) 



CHAPTER I. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Huntington Township, 
Suffolk County, Long Island, New York State, May 31, 1819 — 
the second of a family of nine children, seven boys and two 
girls.* The earliest lineal ancestor I am at present able to trace 
was Abijah W., born in England about 1560. The Rev. Zecha- 
riah W., his son, born 1595, came from England in the ship 
"True-Love" in 1635, and lived at Milford, Connecticut, whence 
his son Joseph W. some time before 1660 passed over to Hunt- 
ington and settled there. From him (Savage's " Genealogical 
Dictionary," vol. 4, p. 524) the Long Island Whitmans de- 
scended. Although Joseph W. does not appear to have been 
very well off in 1660, there is evidence in the town records that 
he afterwards became so. It is probable that he or one of his 
sons purchased the farm at West Hills on which the poet's great 
grandfather, grandfather, and father lived. 

The Whitmans were, and are still, a solid, tall, strong-framed, 
long-lived race of men, moderate of speech, friendly, fond of 
their land and of horses and cattle, sluggish in their passions, but 



* Here is a list of the immediate family: 
The Parents. 
Walter Whitman, . . . , 



Louisa Van Velsor, 

Sons and Daughters. 
Jesse Whitman, . 
Wall Whitman, . 
Mary Elizabeth, . 
Hannah Louisa, . 
An Infant, 
Andrew Jackson, 
George Washington, . 
Thomas Jefferson, . 
Edward, 



Born. Died. 

July 14, 1789. July II, 1855. 
Sept. 22, 1795. May 23, 1873. 



March 2, 1818. 
May 31, 1819. 
Feb. 3, 1821. 
Nov. 28, 1823. 
March 2, 1825. 
April 7, 1827. 
Nov. 28, 1829. 
July 18, 1833. 
Aug. 9, 183s. 



March 21, 1870. 



Sept. 14, 1825. 
December, j86 



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fearful when once started. During the American Revolution of 
i776-'83, they were staunch patriots or " rebels," and several of 
the name were soldiers under Washington, two of them officers 
of some rank. 

The poet's father, Walter W., after a childhood passed at West 
Hills on his parents' farm, when about 15 was put apprentice to 
the carpenter's trade in New York City, and lived and worked 
there as youth and young man. He married in 1816. His busi- 
ness afterwards for many years extended into various parts of 
Long Island. He was a large, quiet, serious man, very kind to 
children and animals, and a good citizen, neighbor and parent. 
In his trade he Vas noted as a superior framer. Not a few of his 
barn and house frames, with their seasoned timbers and careful 
braces and joists, are still standing in Suffolk and Queen's coun- 
ties and in Brooklyn, strong and plumb as ever. 

On his mother's side the poet is descended from the Van Vel- 
sors, a family of farmers settled also on their own land near 
Cold Spring Harbor, three or four miles from West Hills. 
They seem to have been a warm-hearted and sympathetic race. 
An aged man who had known them well, said to me one day at 
Huntington, " Old Major Van Velsor was the best of men ; there 
are no better men than he was — and his wife was just as good a 
woman as he was a man." Walt Whitman's mother, Louisa Van 
Velsor, was their daughter. The family was of Holland Dutch 
descent. The men and boys were fond of horses, the raising of 
which from blooded stock was a large part of their occupation, 
and Louisa, when young, was herself a daring and spirited rider. 
As a woman and mother she was of marked spiritual and intuitive 
nature, remarkably healthy and strong, had a kind, generous 
heart, good sense, and a cheerful and even temper. Walt Whit- 
man himself makes much of the feminine side of his ancestry. 
Both his grandmothers (with each of whom he spent a part of 
every year until he was quite a big lad), appear to have been 
specially noble and endearing characters. At the death of his 
own mother he spoke of her, and his sister-in-law Martha, as 
" the best and sweetest women I ever saw, or ever expect to see." 

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His Hollandic Elements. 17 

Van Velsor ancestry may be found in the ancient, grim, and 
crowded cemeteries of the two families and their branches, run- 
ning back for many generations. To any "Old Mortality" 
these cemeteries — one at West Hills, the other about a mile from 
Cold Spring Harbor — would fully repay the trouble to visit. 
Looking on them as I did a couple of summers since, I thought 
them the most solemn, natural, impressive burial-places I had 
ever seen. 

There is no doubt that both Walt Whitman's personality and 
writings are to be credited very largely to their Holland origin 
through his mother's side. A faithful and subtle investigation 
(and a very curious one it would be) might trace far back many 
of the elements of Leaves of Grass,'^- long before their author 
was born. From his mother also he derived his extraordinary 
affective nature, spirituality and human sympathy. From his 
father chiefly must have come his passion for freedom, and the 
firmness of character which has enabled him to persevere for a- 
lifetime in what he has called "carrying out his own ideal." I 
have heard him say, more than once, that all the members of his'-' 
father's family were noted for their resolution (which he called 
obstinacy), and that nothing ever could or did turn any of them 

* Washington Irving taught the people of New York to laugh at their Dutch ancestors. 
John Lothrop Motley has made them proud of them as the connecting link between them- 
selves and the heroic founders of the Dutch Republic. It is full time that the New Nether- 
lands colonists should be rescued from the limbo of absurdity into which Irving's wit cast 
them. They deserve rehabilitation and a serious history. The merits of their descendants 
speak for them The old Knickerbocker families are still — and have been ever since the day 
when stout old Sir Robert Holmes seized the New Netherlands for England — among the first 
and best people in New York. If all the truth were known, we should be as proud of the 
ship " Goot Vrow" and the landing at Communipaw, as New Englandcrs are of the " May 
Flower" and Plymouth Rock. In Motley's pages what a noble people lives again ! No 
grander fight than theirs for freedom was ever fought. In the cases of Greece against Persia, 
Switzerland against Austria and Burgundy, the American Colonies against England, the first 
French Republic against Monarchial Europe, certain special advantages were on the weaker 
though winning sides, and brilliant victories in the field decided the struggle. But the poor 
and peaceable little Dutch Provinces in their stand against bitter religious persecution, plus 
intolerable tyranny, from the wealthiest and most warlike Kingdom in Europe, were beaten 
repeatedly ; yet they fought on, and when at last, wearied with slaughter, Spain gave over, 
and let them go free, it was not because she was defeated or lacked either men or means to 
carry on the contest, but because she saw that complete conquest of the Netherlands would 
mean the last Hollander dead in the last ditch, and the country the Dutch had reclaimed 
from the ocean once more sunk beneath its waves. Who can read thai history and not think 
of it with pride, if the blood of those heroic people flows in his veins ? — New York Tribune. 



1 8 IVa// Whitman. 

from a course they had once positively decided upon. From 
father and mother alike, he derived his magnificent physique, and 
(until he lost it in 1873 through special causes to be spoken of 
later) his almost unexampled health and fulness of bodily life. 
Walt Whitman* could say with perhaps a better right than almost 
any man for such a boast, that he was 

Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother. 

The other main element which has to be taken into account 
in the formation of the character of the poet, is that he was 
brought up on Long Island, or as he often calls it, giving the old 
Indian name, Paumanok, a peculiar region, over a hundred miles 
long, "shaped like a fish, plenty of sea-shore, the horizon bound- 
less, the air fresh and healthy, the numerous bays and creeks 
swarming with aquatic birds, the south-side meadows covered with 
salt hay, the soil generally tough, but affording numberless springs 
of the sweetest water in the world." In certain parts the scenery, 
especially about West Hills and Huntington, and along the north 
side, is very picturesque. Here and there inland or along the 
coast are magnificent views, among them a grand one from the 
summit of " Jayne's Hill," about a mile from the old Whitman 
farm. On the broad top of this eminence the boy Walt Whit- 
man must have lingered many an hour looking far over the slopes, 
the crests covered with trees, and the valleys between dotted with 
farm-houses — to the south far off the just visible waters of the 
Atlantic, to the north glimpses of Long Island Sound. Perhaps, 
indeed, there are few regions on the face of the earth better fitted 
for the concrete background of such a book as Leaves of Grass. 
After seeing and exploring it, the mind appreciates what was said 
by William O'Connor, after spending some weeks on Long Island 
and its shores, "that no one can ever really get at Whitman's 
poems, and their finest lights and shades, until he has visited and 
familiarized himself with the freshness, scope, wildness and sea- 
beauty of this rugged Island." 

While Walt Whitman was still a child his parents moved to 



* At home, through infancy and boyhood, he was called " Walt," to distinguish him from 
his father " Walter," and the short name has always been used for him by his relatives and 
friends. 



Brooklyn and New York Training. 19 

Brooklyn. Here he grew up, but as lad and young man made 
frequent and long visits to his birth-place, and all through Queen's 
and Suffolk counties. He attended the common schools of 
Brooklyn until he was thirteen years of age, and then he went 
into a printing office and learned to set type. While still a 
youth of sixteen or seventeen he taught school in the country, 
and even then was writing for the newspapers and magazines. 
When he was about nineteen or twenty years of age (in 1839 and 
1840) I find him publishing and editing the "Long Islander," a 
weekly newspaper at Huntington. Then he came to New York 
city to live. 

For the next twelve years he seems to have been employed 
chiefly in printing offices as compositor, and quite often as news- 
paper and magazine writer. It was during those twelve and a few 
immediately following years — say from the age of 19 to 34 or '5 — 
that he acquired his especial education ; and only those who know 
Leaves of Grass can understand the full meaning of that word in 
his case. It was perhaps the most comprehensive equipment ever 
attained by a human being, though many things that the schools 
prescribe were left out. It consisted in absorbing into himself 
the whole city and country about him, New York and Brooklyn, 
and their adjacencies ; not only their outside shows, but far more 
their interior heart and meaning. In the first place he learned 
life — men, women, and children , he went on equal terms with 
every one, he liked them and they him, and he knew them far better 
than they knew themselves. Then he became thoroughly con- 
versant with the shops, houses, sidewalks, ferries, factories, tav- 
erns, gatherings, political meetings, carousings, etc. He was first 
the absorber of the sunlight, the free air and the open streets, 
and then of interiors. He knew the hospitals, poorhouses, 
prisons, and their inmates. He passed freely in and about 
those parts of the city which are inhabited by the worst char- 
acters ; he knew all their people, and many of them knew 
him ; he learned to tolerate their squalor, vice, and ignorance ; 
he saw the good (often much more than the self-righteous 
think) and the bad that was in them, and what there was 
to excuse and justify their lives. It is said that these people, 



20 JJa/f Whit man. 

even the worst of them, while entire strangers to Walt Whitman, 
quite invariably received him without discourtesy and treated him 
well. Perhaps only those who have known the man personally, 
and have felt the peculiar magnetism of his presence, can fully 
understand this. Many of the worst of those characters became 
singularly attached to him. He knew and was sociable with the 
man that sold peanuts at the corner, and the old woman that dis- 
pensed coffee in the market. He did not patronize them, they 
were to him as good as the rest, as good as he, only temporarily 
dimmed and obscured. 

True, he knew, and intimately knew, the better off and edu- 
cated people as well as the poorest and most ignorant. Merchants, 
lawyers, doctors, scholars and writers, were among his friends. 
But the people he knew best and liked most, and who knew him 
best and liked him most, .were neither the rich and conventional, 
nor the worst and poorest, but the decent-born middle-life farm- 
ers, mechanics, carpenters, pilots, drivers, masons, printers, deck- 
hands, teamsters, drovers, and the like. These and their wives 
and children, their old fiithers and mothers, he knew as no one I 
think ever knew them before, and between him and them (espe- 
cially the old folks, the mothers and fathers) in numberless in- 
stances existed the warmest attachments. 

He made himself fiimiliar with all kinds of employments, not 
by reading trade reports and statistics, but by watching and stop- 
ping hours with the workmen (often his intimate friends) at their 
work. He visited the foundries, shops, rolling mills, slaughter- 
houses, woollen and cotton factories, shipyards, wharves, and the 
big carriage and cabinet shops — went to clam-bakes, races, auc- 
tions, weddings, sailing and bathing parties, christenings, and all 
kinds of merry-makings. (In their amplitude, richness, unflag- 
ging movement and gay color, Leaves of Grass, it may be said, 
are but the i)utting in poetic statements of the Manhattan Island 
and Brooklyn of those years, and of to-day.) 

Amitl the rest of his training and exercise he was a frequent 
speaker at debating societies. On Sundays he occasionally went 
to the churches of the various sects of Christians, and sometimes 
the synagogues of the Jews, and if there had been Buddhist tern- 



A Happy and Free Life. 21 

pies, Mohammedan Mosfjucs, and Confucian Joss-houses acces- 
sible, he would undoubtedly have visited those with the same inter- 
est and sympathy. Then he went occasionally to the libraries and 
museums of all sorts. For instance, there was at this time in New 
York a very fine and full collecuon of Egyptian antiquities, and 
for over two years off and on he spent many an hour there ; he 
became friends with the proprietor. Dr. Abbott, a learned Egypt- 
ologist, and gleaned largely from his personal narrations. Reading 
did not go for so very much in Walt Whitman's education — he 
found he could get more from the things themselves than from pic- 
tures or descriptions of them drawn by others ; still his aim was to 
absorb humanity and modern life, and he neglected no means, 
books included, by which this aim could be furthered. A favorite 
mode of study with him was, after an early breakfast, to reach by 
stage or sometimes on foot, several miles from the city, some soli- 
tary spot by the sea-shore, generally Coney Island (a very differ- 
ent place then from what it is now), taking with him a knapsack 
containing a bite of plain food, a towel and a book. There he 
would spend the day in solitude with Nature, walking, thinking, 
observing the sea and sky, bathing, reading, or perhaps reciting 
aloud Homer and Shakespeare as he strode along the beach. 
These years he used to watch the English quarterlies and Black- 
wood, and when he found an article that suited him he would buy 
the number, ])erhaps second-hand, fur a few cents, tear it out, and 
take it witli him on his next sea-beach excursion to digest. Walt 
Whitman's life at this time was perhaps the happiest that has ever 
been lived j he speaks of himself as 

Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee. 

Whatever he did or saw seemed to give him pleasure. At one 
period of his life a special enjoyment in New York was riding up 
and down Broadway on an omnibus, sitting in front, watch- 
ing the crowds and vehicles, and the limitless life of the swarm- 
ing streets. Or crossing the East River, half the day or half the 
night in the pilot-houses of Brooklyn ferry-boats, watching the 
multitudes coming and going, observing the sights on the waters, 
feeling the quiver of the boat, the strong beat of the paddles, and 



22 Walt Whitjnan. 

the rush through the yielding water. Other times he would go 
out to sea with his friends of the pilot-boats, and all day and all 
night enjoy the salt air, the motion of the waves, the speed 
of the boat, the isolation, the deep feeling of communion with 
free Nature and the great brine. The simplest and most common- 
place pursuits (and yet perhaps something rushing) suited him 
best ; the main thing with him was that he was perfectly sound 
and well, and all life's delights were matters of course. 

At one time, (I think along in his twenty-third year or there- 
abouts,) he became quite a speaker at the Democratic mass-meet- 
ings. He spoke in New York City and down at country gather- 
ings on Long Island. He was quite popular at Jamaica, in 
Queen's County. (He had been a student at the Academy there 
when a big lad.) Though he took (in Brooklyn and New York, 
1840 -'55,) no strenuous personal part in "politics" — in the 
City, State and National elections — he watched their progress 
carefully, sometimes aided in the nomination of candidates, per- 
haps voted at the municipal elections, and always at the Con- 
gressional and Presidential ones. 

Though all this practical, tumultuous, varied and generally 
outdoor life was enjoyment to Walt Whitman, there had come to 
his young maturity one supreme enjoyment, the Italian opera. 
And the climax of the opera to him was the singing of the famous 
contralto ^Iboni. It was during the time of which I am now 
speaking that she came to New York, and he did not miss hear- 
ing her one single night. I have heard him say that the influence 
of Alboni's singing upon him was a most important factor in his 
poetic growtii. He speaks of her in Leaves of Grass, as 

The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, 
Sister of loftiest gods. 

Throughout all his life indeed the opera and the best music 
has been one of his chief delights. He heard all the good bands, 
orchestras, or soloists who came to New York from 1840 to i860, 
and I know that many passages of his poetry were suggested or 
inspired by one or other of them, and often written down at the 
moment, or immediately afterwards. 



i847-'49 — -Jau^it to Louisiana. 23 

To use the simple and hearty old scripture phrase, " the love of 
women " has, of course, been, and is in a legitimate sense, one 
of the man's elementary passions. I can only touch upon this 
subject, which is sufficiently set forth in the latter lines of the 
following extract from John Burroughs's " Notes " : 

For a few years he now seems to be a member of that light battalion of 
writers for the press who, with facile pen, compose tale, report, editorial, or 
what-not, for pleasure and a living ; a peculiar class, always to be found in 
any large city. Once in a while he appears at the political mass meetings 
as a speaker. He is on the Democratic side, at the time going for Van Buren 
for President, and, in due course, for Polk. He speaks in New York, and 
down on Long Island, where he is made much of. Through this period 
(1840 -'55), without entering into particulars, it is enough to say that he 
sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions, pleasures and aban- 
donments. He was young, in perfect bodily condition, and had the city of 
New York and its ample opportunities around him. I trace this period in 
some of the poems of " Children of Adam," and occasionally in other parts 
of his book, including " Calamus." 

In 1847 S'^d '48 he was occupied in Brooklyn as editor of the 
" Daily Eagle " newspaper, (It is said to have been his strenuous 
and persistent advocacy that secured to the city the old Fort 
Greene battle-ground, now known as Washington Park.) About 
1849, being now thirty years of age, having lived so far entirely 
on Long Island and Brooklyn and in New York, and besides the 
invariable though moderate labor necessary to pay his way, occu- 
pied himself enjoying and absorbing their shows, life and facili- 
ties, he started on a long tour through the Middle, Southern 
and Western States. He passed slowly through Pennsylvania and 
Virginia, crossed the Alleghany Mountains, took a steamboat at 
Wheeling, descended by leisurely stages the Ohio and Mississippi 
Rivers to New Orleans, and lived there some time, employed edi- 
torially on a newspaper, the "Crescent." Outside of work 
hours he occupied himself observing Southern life, people, the 
river, with its miles of levee and its multitudinous and peculiar 
scenes. He seems to have passed much the same sort of a 
time as in New York— that is, a life of the open streets and public 
places, hotels, theatres, evening drives and social meetings — (and 
[ know no city where such a life may be more enjoyable than 



24 Walt WJiitman. 

New Orleans). He liked to go to the great French market for 
an early morning walk, for the sake of the peculiar stir and shows 
of the place — often took his breakfast at a coffee-stand there kept 
by a large, handsome mulatto woman. All who have lived in the 
Southern States, and love them (and who that has ever lived there 
can think of them without affection and longing ?) will feel in a 
hundred places, in reading Leaves of Grass, that Walt Whitman 
has caught and transferred to his pages the true atmosphere of that 
delicious and sunny region. 

After staying about a year in New Orleans, he visited various 
other parts of the South, and then turned North again. Ascend- 
ing the Mississippi to St. Louis, he stayed there for a time, then 
journeyed to Chicago, to Milwaukee, and so up to the Straits of 
Mackinaw. From there, turning east and south, after lingering 
awhile at Detroit, he slowly descended the great lakes to Niagara, 
and, with many lags and stoppages, crossed New York State and 
returned to Brooklyn. 

In 1 85 1 and '52 he published and edited a newspaper of his 
own, the '' Freeman," in Brooklyn. He afterward built and sold 
moderate-sized houses. At this last business he made money, 
and if he had continued would probably have become rich. (He 
seems to have thought there was danger of this, and that was one 
reason, no doubt, why he gave it up.) Early in the fifties 
Leaves of Grass began to take a sort of unconscious shape in his 
mind. In 1854 he commenced definitely writing out the 
poems that were printed in the first edition. Though most of 
this period was occupied with the house-building speculations, 
he made frequent excursions down Long Island, and at times 
would remain away in some solitary place, by the sea-shore or in 
the woods, for weeks at a time. The twelve poems which make • 
up the original 1855 edition finished, they were printed at the 
establishment of Andrew and James Rome, corner of Fulton and 
Cranberry Streets, Brooklyn, the poet himself assisting to set 
the type. 

I insert here a short account furnished me (in Brooklyn in 
July, 1 881) by a person who knew Walt Whitman soon after 



1850 to '55. 25 

1849 — that is, subsequent to his 30th year. I give it in the nar- 
rator's own words as I jotted them down at the time : 

Walt Whitman had a small printing office and book store on Myrtle Avenue, 
Brooklyn, where after his return from the South he started the " Freeman " 
newspaper, first as weekly, then as daily, and continued it a year or so. The 
superficial opinion about him was that he was somewhat of an idler, " a 
loafer," but not in a bad sense. He always earned his own livuig. I 
thought him a very natural person. He wore plain, cheap clothes, which 
were always particularly clean. Everybody knew him, everyone almost 
liked him. We all of us (referring to the other members of his family, 
brothers, sisters, father and mother), long before he published Leaves of 
Grass, looked upon him as a man who was to make a mark in the world. He 
was always a good listener,- the best I ever knew — of late years, I thmk, he 
talks somewhat more — in those early years (i849-'54) he talked very little 
indeed. When he did talk his conversation was remarkably pointed, attrac- 
tive, and clear. When Leaves of Grass first appeared I thought it a great 
work, but that the man was greater than the book. His singular coolness 
was an especial feature. I have never seen hma excited in the least degree : 
never heard him swear but once. He was quite gray at thirty. He had a 
look of age in his youth, as he has now a look of youth in his age. 

The great International Exhibition or World's Fair of 1853 in 
New York, in that vast structure (Sixth Avenue and Fortieth 
Street) of glass and iron, never excelled for architectural senti- 
ment and beauty, with its rare and ample picture collection from 
Europe, its statues, specimens of the fabrics of all nations, silver 
and gold plate, machinery, ores, woods of different countries, 
with its immense streams of visitors day and night, had for him 
a powerful attraction, kept up for nearly a year. Among his 
favorite haunts through the building were the area containing 
Thorwaldsen's colossal group of Christ and the twelve apostles, 
the department of woods and timber, the thousand works in the 
long picture gallery — a collection never surpassed in any land — 
and then occasionally to stand a long while under the lofty 
heavy glass dome. 

Early in 1855 he was writing Leaves of Grass from time to 
time, getting it in shape. Wrote at the opera, in the street, on 
the ferry-boat, at the sea-side, in the fields, sometimes stopped 
work to write. Certainly no book was ever more directly written 
from living impulses and impromptu sights, and less in the 

3 



26 IVaU Whitman. 

abstract. Quit house-building in the spring of 1855 to print 
and jniblish the first edition. Then, "when the book aroused 
such a tempest of anger and condemnation everywhere," to 
give his own words as he has since tokl me, " I went off to the 
"cast end of Long IsUtnd, and spent the hite summer and all the 
"fall — the happiest of my life — around Shelter Island and Peco- 
" nic Bay. Then came back to New York with the confirmed 
"resolution, from which I never afterwards wavered, to go on 
"with my poetic enterprise in my own way, and finish it as well 
"as I could." 

Early in July this year had occurred the death of his father, 
after a suffering of many years, from serious illness and prostra- 
tion. 

The memoranda which follow were written for this volume in 
1 88 1 by a lady — Miss Helen E. Price, of Woodside, Long 
Island — whose acquaintance with Walt Whitman, and his fre- 
quent temporary residence in her parents' family, make her pecu- 
liarly competent to present a picture of the man in those periods 
of middle life : 

My acquaintance with Wall Whitman began in 1S56, or about a year after 
he pubUshed the first edition of Leaves of Grass. I was at that time living 
with my parents in Brooklyn, and although hardly more than a child in years, 
the impression made upon my girlish imagination by his large, grand pres- 
ence, his loose, free dress, and his musical voice will never be elTaced. From 
that date until the death of his mother, in 1873, he was often a visitor at our 
house, as I at his, his mother being only less dear to me than my own. 

So many remembrances of him in those by gone years come ci^owding to 
my mind that to choose what wdl be most characteristic, and most likely to 
interest those who know him only from his books, is a task to which I fear I 
shall prove unequal. On the other hand, anything I might write of him, his 
conversation especially, when deprived of the magnetism of his presence and 
voice, and of the circumstances and occasions which called forth the words, 
will, I am painfully aware, seem poor and tame. 

I must prefiice my first anecdote of him with some description of a gentle- 
man with whom many of my early recollections of his conversations are 
connected. At that time Mr. A. was living with his daughter's family, who 
occujiicd with us the same house. A. was a man of wiile knowleilge and 
the most analytical mind of any one I ever knew. He was a Swedenborgian, 
not formally belonging to the church of that name, but accepting in the 



Letter from Helen Price. 27 

main the doctrines of the Swedish seer as revealed in his works. Although 
the two men differed greatly on many points, such was the mutual esteem and 
forbearance between them, that during the many talks they had together, in 
which I sat by a delighted listener, it was only on one occasion (at the out- 
break of our civil war) that I ever noticed the slightest irritation between 
them. Each, though holding mainly to his own views, was large enough to 
see truth in the other's presentation also. The subject of many of their early 
conversations was Democracy. No one who has even the slightest acquaint- 
ance with Walt Whitman's writings needs to be told what were and are his 
ideas on that subject — with what passionate ardor he espouses the cause of 
the people, and the fervent and glowing faith he has in their ultimate destiny. 
Mr. A. rather inclmed to the Carlylean and perhaps Emersonian idea, that 
from among the masses are to be found only here and there individuals 
capable of rightly governing themselves and others, as in myriads of grains 
of sand, there are only occasional diamonds — or in innumerable seeds, only a 
very few destined to develop into perfect plants. Some months after our first 
meeting with Mr. Whitman, my mother invited Mrs. Eliza A. Farnum (former 
matron of Sing Sing prison) to meet hmi at our house. In the beginning of 
conversation he said to her, " I know more about you, Mrs. Farnum, than you 
think I do ; I have heard you spoken of often by friends of mine at Sing Sing 
at the time you were there." Then turning to Mr. A., who sat near by, he 
added in a lower tone, half seriously, half quizzically, " Some of the prisoners." 
This was said solely for Mr. A.'s benefit, as a kind of supplement to their talks 
on Democracy. 

No one could possibly have more aversion to being lionized than Mr. Whit- 
man. I could not say how many times, after getting his consent to meet certain 
admirers at our house, he has vexed and annoyed us by staying away. At one 
time an evening was appointed to meet General T., of Philadelphia, and a 
number of others. We waited with some misgivings for his appearance, but 
he came at last. Soon as the introductions were over, he sidled off to a corner 
of the room where there was a group of young children, with whom he talked 
and laughed and played, evidently to their mutual satisfaction. Our company, 
who had come from a distance to see Mr. Whitman, and did not expect another 
opportunity, were quite annoyed, and my mother was finally commissioned to 
get him out of his corner. When she told her errand, he looked up with the 
utmost merriment, and said, " O, yes — FU do it — where do you want me to 
sit ? On the piano ?" He went forward very good-naturedly, however, but I 
knew that his happy time for that evening was over. 

A friend of ours, a very brilliant and intellectual lady, had often expressed 
a great desire to see him — but as she lived out of town it was difficult to 
arrange a meeting. One day she came to our house full of animation and 
triumph. " I have seen Walt Whitman at last," she said. " I was sitting in the 
cabin of the Brooklyn ferry-boat when he came in, I knew it was he ; it 



28 Wall Whitmajt. 

couldn't be any one else ; and as he walked through the boat with such an 
elephantine roll and swing, I could hardly keep from getting right up and 
rolling after him." The next time he called we related this to him; he 
laughed heartily, and frequently afterward alluded to his " elephantine roll." 

Mr. Whitman was not a smooth, glib, or even a very fluent talker. His 
ideas seemed always to be called forth or suggested by what was said before, 
and he would frequently hesitate for just the right term to express his meaning. 
He never gave the impression that his words were cut and dried in his mind, 
or at his tongue's end, to be used on occasion; but you listened to what seemed 
to be freshly thought, which gave to all he said an indescribable charm. His 
language was forcible, rich and vivid to the last degree, and even when most 
serious and earnest, his talk was always enlivened by frequent gleams of humor. 
(I believe it has been assumed by the critics that he has no humor. There 
could not be a greater mistake.) I have said that in conversation he was not 
fluent, yet when a little excited in talking on any subject very near his heart, 
his words would come forth rapidly, and in strains of amazing eloquence. At 
such times I have wished our little circle was enlarged a hundred-fold, that 
others might have the privilege of hearing him. 

As a listener (all who have met him will agree with me) I think that he 
was and is unsurpassed. He was ever more anxious to hear your thought 
than to express his own. Often when asked to give his opinion on any sub- 
ject, his first words would be, " Tell me what you have to say about it." His 
method of considering, pondering, what Emerson calls " entertaining," your 
thought was singularly agreeable and flattering, and evidently an outgrowth 
of his natural manner, and as if unconscious of paying you any special com- 
pliment. He seemed to call forth the best there was in those he met. He 
never appeared to me a conceited or egotistical man, though I have frequently 
heard him say himself that he was so. On the contrary, he was always unassum- 
ing and modest in asserting himself, and seemed to feel, or at least made others 
feel, that their opinions were more valuable than his own. I have heard him 
express serious doubt as to what would be the final judgment of posterity on 
his poems, or " pieces" as he sometimes called them. 

I have, however, seen in his character something that, for wan' of a better 
word, I would call vanity. I think it arose from his superabundant vitality 
and strength. All through those years he gloried in his health, his magnificent 
physical proportions, his buoyant and overflowirfg life (this was in the first ten 
years of my acquaintance with him), and whatever so-called oddity there was 
in his dress and looks arose, I think, from this peculiar consciousness or pride. 
We all thought that his costume suited him, and liked every part of it except 
his hat. He wore a soft French beaver, with rather a wide brim and a tower- 
ing crown, which was always pushed up high. My sister would sometimes 
take it slyly just before he was ready to go, flatten the crown, and fix it more 
in accordance with the shape worn by others. All in vain ; invariably on 



Letter' from Helen Price. 2Q 

taking it up his fist would be thrust inside, and it would speedily assume its 
original dimensions. 

One day, in 1S5S I think, he came to see us, and after talking awhile 
on various matters, he announced, a little diffidently I thought, that he had 
written a new piece. In answer to our inquiries, he said it was about a 
mocking bird, and was founded on a real incident. My mother suggested 
that he bring it over and read to us, which he promised to do. In some 
doubt, in spite of this assurance, we were, therefore, agreeably surprised 
when a few days after he appeared with the manuscript of " Out of the Cradle 
Endlessly Rocking" in his pocket. At first he wanted one of us to read it. 
Mr. A. took it and read it through with great appreciation and feeling. He 
then asked my mother to read it, which she did. And finally, at our special 
request, he read it himself. That evening comes before me now as one of the 
most enjoyable of my life. At each reading fresh beauties revealed themselves 
to me. I could not say whose reading I preferred ; he liked my mother's, and 
Mr. A. liked his. After the three readings were over, he asked each one of 
us what we would suggest in any way, and I can remember how taken aback 
and nonplussed I was when he turned and asked me also. 

He once (I forget what we were talkuig about — friendship, I think) said 
there was a wonderful dejsth of meaning (" at second or third removes," as he 
called it) in the old tales of mythology. In that of Cupid and Psyche, for 
instance ; it meant to him that the ardent expression in words of affection 
often tended to destroy affection. It was like the golden fruit which turned 
to ashes upon being grasped, or even touched. As an illustration, he mentioned 
the case of a young man he was in the habit of meeting every morning where 
he went to work. He said there had grown up between them a delightful 
silent friendship and sympathy. But one morning when he went as usual to 
the office, the young man came forward, shook him violently by the hand, and 
expressed in heated language the affection he felt for him. Mr. Whitman said 
that all the subtle charm of their unspoken friendship was from that time gone. 

He was always an ardent lover of music, and heard all the operas, ora- 
torios, bands, and all the great singers who visited New York during those 
years. I heard him very frequently speak of Grisi, Mario, Sontag, La Grange, 
Jenny Lind, Alboni, Bosio, Truffi, Bettini, Marini, Badiali, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. 
Seguin ; and I was never tired of listening to his accounts of them. Alboni 
he considered by far the greatest of them all, both as regards voice and emo- 
tional and artistic power. If I remember rightly, he told me that during her 
engagament in the city he went to hear her twenty nights. Brignoli in his 
prime he thought superior to Mario. Bettini, however, was his favorite tenor, 
and Badiali, the baritone, was another favorite. . In talking to him once about 
music I found he had read George Sand's "Consuelo," and enjoyed it 
thoroughly. One passage he liked best was where Consuelo sings in church 
at the very beginning of her musical career. He said he had read it over 



30 Wa/i Whitman. 

many times. I remember hearing him mention other books of George Sand's, 
"the Journeyman Joiner" and the " Devil's Pool," which he liked much. 

But although he talked of music and books with me, and of politics, patriot- 
ism, and the news of the day with Mr. A., it was in talking with my mother 
on the spiritual nature of man, and on the reforms of the age and kindred 
themes, that he took special delight. These appeared to be his favorite topics, 
and she, having similar sympathies and tastes, would take an equal pleasure 
with himself in discussing them. It was the society of my mother that was 
certainly Walt Whitman's greatest attraction to our house. She had a nature 
in many respects akin to his own — a broad, comprehensive mind, which 
enabled her to look beyond and through externals into the esi,ence of things 
— a large, generous spirit in judging whoever she came in contact with, always 
recognizing the good and ignoring the evil — a strong deep faith in an infinite 
overruling goodness and power, and a most tender and loving heart. How 
many times has she taken in outcasts who have come to our door, and treated 
them to the best the house afforded, regardless of dirt, disease, everything but 
their humanity and suffering. How many times (not always however) has 
she been most wofully deceived and drawn into much trouble thereby. It 
made no difference, the next one that came would be treated with the same 
hospitality in spite of all remonstrance and argument. She has gone to that 
unknown world she was so fond of speculating upon, and never will the 
memory of her unselfish life, her exceeding love and charity, fade from the 
hearts of her children and friends. It was in her friendship, and in this 
women s circle — a mother and two daughters — that Mr. Whitman passed not 
a few of his leisure hours during all those years. 

Walt Whitman, the most intuitive man I ever knew, had the least regard 
for mere verbal smartness. While seeing him listening with bent head to Mr. 
A.'s arguments upon some point on which they radically differed, I have often 
been reminded of that passage in his book, 

Logic and sermons never convince ; 

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. 

While admitting and appreciating the force of reason and logic, yet if they 
were in conflict with what he felt in the depths of his soul to be true, he 
would hold fast to the latter, even though he could give no satisfactory reason 
for so doing. Though he would himself pooh-pooh the assumption, I have 
no doubt also he had spells of singular abstraction and exaltation. I re- 
member hearing my mother describe an interview she once had with him 
while we were living in Brooklyn during the early years of our acquaintance. 
Death was the subject of their conversation. For a few minutes, she said, 
his face wore an expression she had never seen before — he seemed rapt, ab- 
sorbed. In describing it afterward, she said he appeared like a man in a 
trance. Is not this a clue to many pages in Leaves of Grass ? It would 
almost seem that in writing his poems he was taken possession of by a force. 



Letter frojn Helen Price. 31 

genius, inspiration, or whatever it may be called, that he was powerless to 
resist. We all felt this strange power on first reading his book, and that his 
poetry both was and was not part of himself. So that (as sometimes happened 
afterward) when he would say things at variance with what he had written, 
Mr. A. would remark to him, half jokingly, " Why, Walt, you ought to read 
Leaves of GrassT After the interview I have just described, my mother 
always felt that she had seen him in the state in which many of the earlier 
poems were conceived. 

I never took notes of his conversations, and can only recall the general 
impression they made upon me. I can remember an occasional expression or 
opinion, but nothing of any importance. My brother and I were starting out 
one morning to choose a parlor carpet. Hearing of our errand he said, 
" What a good idea it would be to have the pattern of a carpet designed of 
leaves — nothing but leaves — all sizes, shapes, and colors, like the ground 
under the trees in autumn." 

I met him once in the Brooklyn street cars, soon after an article appeared 
in "the Radical" entitled "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman." He 
asked if I had read it. I answered that I had, and that I should think he 
would like to know the lady who wrote it. " No," he said, " that does not so 
much matter. I do not even know her name." After a pause, he added, " But 
it was a great comfort to me." 

If I were asked what I considered Walt Whitman's leading characteristic, 
I should say — and it is an opinion formed upon an acquaintance of over 
twenty years — his religiotis senti7nent or feeling. It pervades and dominates, 
his life, and I think no one could be in his presence any length of time with- 
out being impressed by it. He is a born exaltL His is not that religion, or 
show of it, that is comprised in dogmas, churches, creeds, etc. These are of 
little or no consequence to him, but it is that habitual state of feeling in which 
the person regards everything in God's universe with wonder, reverence, per- 
fect acceptance, and love. He has more of all this than any one I have ever 
met. The deeply earnest spirit with which he looks upon humanity and life is 
so utterly opposed to cynicism and persiflage, that these always chill and repel 
him. He himself laughs at nothing (in a contemptuous sense), looks down 
on nothing — on the contrary everything is beautiful and wonderful to him. 

One day I called upon his mother in Brooklyn and found him there. 
When I was going home he said he would cross the feriy with me. On our 
journey we had to pass through one of the great markets of New York in 
order to reach the cars running to the upper part of the city. I was hurrying 
through, according to my usual custom, but he kept constantly stopping me to 
point out the beautiful combinations of color at the butchers' stalls, and other 
stands ; but above all the fish excited in him quite an enthusiasm. He made 
me admire their beautiful shapes and delicate tints, and I learned from him 
that day a lesson I have never forgotten. 



32 Wa/l Whitman. 

One evening in iS66, while he was stopping with us in New York, the tea 
bell had been rung ten minutes or more when he came down from his room, 
and we all gathered around the table. I remarked him as he entered the 
room ; there seemed to be a peculiar brightness and elation about him, an 
almost irrepressible joyousness, which shone from his face and seemed to per- 
vade his whole body. It was the more noticeable as his ordinary mood 
was one of quiet, yet cheerful serenity. I knew he had been working at 
a new edition of his book, and I hoped if he had an opportunity he would 
say something to let us into the secret of his mysterious joy. Unfortunately 
most of those at the table were occupied with some subject of conversation ; 
at every pause I waited eagerly for him to speak; but no, some one else 
would begin again, until I grew almost wild with impatience and vexation. 
He appeared to listen, and would even laugh at some of the remarks that 
were made, yet he did not utter a single word during the meal ; and his face 
still wore that singular brightness and delight, as though he had partaken of 
some divine elixir. His expression was so remarkable that I might have 
doubted my own observation, had it not been noticed by another as well as 
myself. 

I never heard him allude directly but once to what has been so severely 
condemned in his books. It happened in this way. He had come on from 
Washington and was stopping with us at the time (it was in 1866), prepar- 
ing the new edition of Leaves of Grass just spoken of. My mother and I 
were busy sewing in the sitting-room when he came back from a two hours' 
absence and threw himself on the lounge. He said he had been offered veiy 
favorable terms by a publisher down town (we were living m the upper part 
of New York at that time) if he would consent to leave out a few lines from 
two of his pieces. " But I dare not do it," he said ; " I dare not leave out or 
alter what is so genuine, so indispensable, so lofty, so pure." Those were his 
exact words. The intense, I might almost say religious, earnestness with 
which they were uttered made an impression upon me that I shall never 
forget. 

Here is another authentic personal account out of those years 
— say from 1854 to '60 — taken from the New York "World" 
of June 4th, 1882, and written by Thomas A. Gere : 

Thirty years ago, while employed upon an East .River steamboat, I became 
acquainted with Walt Whitman, and the association has ever since been a 
treasured one by myself and the rest of my companion boatmen. He came 
among us simply as a sociable passenger, but his genial behavior soon made 
him a most welcome visitor. We knew somewhat of his reputation as a man 
of letters, but the fact made no great impression upon us, nor did he ever 
attempt a display of his gifts or learning that would in the least make us feel 
he was not " of us, and one of us," as he used to express it. In a charm- 



Letter from Thomas Gere. 33 

ingly practical democratic manner he took great pains to teach many valuable 
things to a hard-handed band of men whose life had afforded little time for 
books. In later years I have realized that "Walt" — he would allow no 
other salutation from us — has done much gratuitous work as a teacher, and in 
looking back I also realize his excellence as an instructor. A careful choice 
of words and terse method of explaining a subject were truly peculiar to him 
— at least the faculty was marvellous to us. In our long watches — he would 
pass entire afternoons and even nights with us — he would discourse in a clear, 
conversational sort of way upon politics, literature, art, music or the drama, 
from a seemingly endless storing of knowledge. He certainly urged some of 
us into a desire for attainments that perhaps would not otherwise have been 
aroused. 

" My boy," he would often say, after simply but eloquently treating some 
theme, * you must read more of this for yourself," and then generously put his 
library at the listener's service. I have seen a youth swabbing a steamboat's 
deck with Walt's Homer m his monkey-jacket pocket ! At all times he was 
keenly inquisitive m matters that belonged to the river or boat. He had to 
have a reason for the actions of the pilot, engineer, fireman and even deck- 
hands. Besides, he would learn the details of everything on board, from 
the knotted end of a bucket-rope to the construction of the engine. " Tell me 
all about it, boys," he would say, " for these are the real things I cannot get 
out of books." I am inclined to think that such inquisitiveness must always 
have been an industrious habit with him, for his writings abound with apt 
technicalities. 

Walt's appearance used to attract great attention from the passengers when 
he came on board the boat. He was quite six feet in height, with the frame 
of a gladiator, a flowing gray beard mingled with the hairs on his broad, 
slightly bared chest. In his well-laundried checked shirt-sleeves, with trous- 
ers frequently pushed into his boot-legs, his fine head covered with an immense 
slouched black or light felt hat, he would walk about with a naturally ma- 
jestic stride, a massive model of ease and independence. I hardly think his 
style of dress in those days was meant to be eccentric; he was very antago- 
nistic to all show or sham, and I fancy he merely attired himself in what was 
handy, clean, economical and comfortable. His marked appearance, how- 
ever, obtained for him a variety of callings in the minds of passengers who 
did not know him. "Is he a retired sea captain?" some would ask; "an 
actor ? a military officer ? a clergyman ? Had he been a smuggler, or in the 
slave trade?" To amuse Walt I frequently repeated these odd speculations 
upon him. He laughed until the tears ran when I once told him that a very 
confidential observer had assured me he was crazy ! 

What enjoyable nights they were when Walt M'ould come to us after a long 
study at home or in some prominent New York library ! He would, 
indeed, "loaf" and unbend to our great delight with rich, witty anecdotes 



34 Wa/t Whitman. 

and pleasant sarcasms upon some events and men of the day. At times he 
would be joined by some literary acquaintance, generally to our disgust, or 
perhaps I should say jealousy, for we fancied that in some way we rather 
owned Walt; but the long classical debates that would occur, and deep sub- 
jects that would be dug up, used to waste the night in a most exasperating 
degree. 

Walt's musical ability was a very entertaining quality : he was devotedly 
fond of opera, and many were the pleasant scraps and airs with which he 
would enliven us in a round, manly voice, when passengers were few and 
those few likely to be asleep on the seats. Our best attention was given to his 
recitations. In my judgment few could excel his reading of stirring poems 
and brilliant Shakespearian passages. These things he vented evidently for 
his own practice or amusement. I have heard him proceed to a length of 
some soliloquy in "Hamlet," "Lear," " Coriolanus " and " Macbeth," and 
when he had stopped suddenly and said with intense dissatisfaction, " No ! no ! 
no ! that's the way the bad actors would do it," he would start off again and 
recite the part most impressively. 

It is believed and asserted that his works will yet rise to meritorious emi- 
nence. Of this I do not feel competent to speak. I did not know him as the 
" Gray-Maned Lion of Camden," or "America's Good Gray Poet," but 
simply as dear old Walt. T. A. G. 

Walt Whitman kept on for some years, working probably half 
the time, (though his life those years was so leisurely and free, he 
averaged from six to seven hours regular labor every day from 
his thirteenth year to past fifty), making trips into the country, 
writing poems, and, above all, enjoying life as it has seldom been 
enjoyed — until the breaking out of the Secession War. That 
event, which affected the business and the feelings of every per- 
son in the country, had an extraordinary bearing upon him. His 
brother George had volunteered and gone to the front. One 
morning in the middle of December, 1862, just after the first 
Fredericksburg battle, they saw by the military news in the New , 
York -'Herald" that George was wounded, it was thought 
seriously. Walt Whitman at an hour's notice started for the 
army camp on the Rappahannock. He found his brother wounded 
in the face by a fragment of shell, but the hurt not serious and 
already healing. The poet stayed several weeks in camp, absorb- 
ing all the grim sights and experiences of actual campaigning 
(and nothing could have been gloomier or more bloody than the 



In the IVar^s darkest time. 35 

season fqllowing "first Fredericksburg") through the depth of 
winter, in the flimsy shelter-tents, and in the impromptu hospi- 
tals, where thousands lay wounded, helpless, dying. He then 
returned to Washington, in charge of some Brooklyn soldiers 
with amputated limbs or down with illness. He had no definite 
plans at that time, or for long afterwards ; but attention to the 
Brooklyn friends led to nursing others, and he stayed on and on, 
gradually falling into the labor and occupation, with reference to 
the war, which would do the most good, and be most satisfactory 
to himself. 

I have heard him say that he was as much astonished as any 
one at the success of that personal ministration in the army hos- 
pitals. To pay his way he began writing correspondence for the 
New York and other papers ; his letters were accepted and quite 
handsomely remunerated. So he stayed at Washington month 
after month, engaged in the work of the hospitals, and from time 
to time visiting the battle-fields. His services seemed imperi- 
ously needed. At that period, indeed the gloomiest of the war, 
hundreds of the sick and wounded of both armies were literally 
perishing for the want of decent care. His work as now com- 
menced and continued for two to three years has never been, 
and perhaps never will be fully told. Doubtless it best remains 
in the memories of the saved soldiers. In two extracts which 
follow presently, and perhaps still better by suggestion in W. 
D. O'Connor's "Carpenter,"* those three years are but out- 
lined. A surgeon who throughout the war had charge of one 
of the largest army hospitals in Washington has told the pres- 
ent writer that (without personal acquaintance, or any other 
than professional interest) he watched for many months Walt 
^Vhitman's ministerings to the sick and wounded, and was satis- 
fied that he saved many lives. I do not believe this statement 
exaggerated. I believe, knowing Walt Whitman as I do, and 
having some knowledge of medicine, that the man did possess 
an extraordinary power, by which he must have been able in 
many cases to turn the scale in fiivor of life, when without him 



* The Carpenter — A Christmas story — by the author of "The Ghost." — Putnam's 
Monthly Magazine, January, 1868. 



36 Walt WJiitman. 

the result would have been death. The following extract is from 
a letter by John Swinton in the New York "Herald of April 
ist, 1 8/6 : 

For nearly twenty years I have been on terms of affectionate intimacy with 
Walt Whitman. I knew him in his splendid prime, when his familiar figure 
was daily seen on Broadway, and when he was brooding over those extraor- 
dinary poems which have since been put into half a dozen languages, and 
commanded the homage of many of the greatest minds in modern literature. 
From then to the time of his paralysis I know of his life and deeds. Rich 
in good works and in saddening trials, he has remained the same genuine man, 
in whom the well-springs of po-try give perpetual freshness to the passing 
years. His paralysis was the result of his exhausting labors among our sick 
and wounded soldiers in the hospitals near Washington during the war. I 
saw something of these labors when I was visiting the hospitals. I can testify, as 
countless others can, that for at least three years the " Good Gray Poet " spent 
a large portion of his time, day and night, in the hospitals, as nurse and 
comforter of those who had been maimed or otherwise prostrated in the ser- 
vice of their country. I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Penin- 
sula after a battle there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, iii the 
Washington hospitals, or wending his way there with basket or haversack 
on his arm, and the strength of beneficence suffusing his face. His devotion 
surpassed the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his 
kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness. 

Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds 
through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose hero- 
ism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and 
each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a 
smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence 
seemed to light up the place as it might be lit by the presence of the Son of 
Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whis- 
pers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him. To one he 
gave a few words of cheer, for another he wrote a letter home, to others he gave 
an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a slieet of paper or a post- 
age stamp, all of which and many other things were in his capacious haver- 
sack. From another he would receive a dying message for mother, wife, or 
sweetheart ; for another he would promise to go an errand ; to another, some 
special friend, very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the 
things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a 
benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours 
in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he took his way towards the 
door, you could hear the voice of many a stricken hero calling, "Walt, Walt, 
Walt, come again ! come again ! " 



Letter from G. S. McWatters. 37 

His basket and store, filled with all sorts of odds and ends for the men, had 
been emptied. He had really little to give, but it seemed to me as though he 
gave more chan other men. 

Here also is a paragraph from the New York "Tribune," by 
G. S. McWatters, summer of iSSo: 

While walking in the neighborhood of New Rochelle, Westchester County, 
a few days ago, I observed a man at work in a field adjoining the road, and I 
opened a conversation with him. He had served in the Union Army during 
the Rebellion, and I had no trouble in inducing him to fight some of his bat- 
tles over again. He gave me a graphic description of how he was badly 
wounded in the leg ; how the doctors resolved to cut his leg off; his resistance 
to the proposed amputation, and his utter despair when he found he must lose 
his leg (as they said) to save his life. As a last resort, he determined to appeal 
to a man who visited the hospital about every alternate day. This man was a 
representative of the Sanitary Commission [this of course is a mistake], and 
he described him as a tall, well-built man with the face of an angel. He car- 
ried over his broad shoulders a well-filled haversack, containing about every- 
thing that would give a sick soldier comfort. In it were pens, ink and paper, 
thread, needles, buttons, cakes, candy, fruit, and above all, pipes and tobacco. 
This last article was in general demand. When he asked a poor fellow if he 
used tobacco and the answer was " no " he would express some kind words of 
commendation, but when the answer was " yes," he would produce a piece of 
plug and smilingly say, " Take it, my brave boy, and enjoy it." He wrote 
letters for those who were not able to write, and to those who could he would 
furnish the materials, and never forgot the postage stamp. His good-natured 
and sympathetic inquiry about their health and what changes had taken place 
since he last saw them, impressed every patient with the feeling that he was 
their personal friend. To this man Rafferty (that was my informant's name) 
made his last appeal to save his shattered leg. He was listened to with atten- 
tion, a minute inquiry into his case, a pause, and after a few moments' thought 
the man replied, patting him on the head, " May your mind rest easy, my boy ; 
they shan't take it off." Rafferty began to describe his feelings when he 
received this assurance, and though so many years have passed since then, his 
emotions mastered him, his voice trembled and thickened, his eyes filled with 
tears, he stopped for a moment and then blurted out, slapping his leg with Lis 
hand, " This is the leg that man saved for me." I asked the name of the 
Good Samaritan. He said he thought it was Whitcomb or something like that. 
I suggested it was just like Walt Whitman. The name seemed to rouse the old 
soldier within him; he did not wait for another word from mje, but seized my 
hand in both of his, and cried, "That's the man, that's the name ; do you 
know him ?" 

The following extract from a letter by a lady addressed to the 



38 Wa/l Whitman. 

present writer will help to show how Walt Whitman saved money 
to get little comforts for those hospital inmates : 

I remember calling upon him in Washington during the war, with Mr. T. 
He occupied a little room in the third or fourth story of a house where he 
could get the cheapest rent. He was just eating his breakfast ; it was about 
lo A.M.; he sat beside the fire, toasting a slice of bread on a jackknife, with 
a cup of tea without milk ; a little sugar in a brown paper, and butter in some 
more brown paper. He was making his meal for the next eight hours. He 
was using all his means and time and energies for the sick and wounded in 
the hospitals. 

Finally, the letter which follows — (one of hundreds that of 
course never dreamed of seeing print, recovered by me by a 
lucky accident), written by Walt Whitman himself to Mrs. Price, 
mother of the lady whose reminiscences are given some pages 
back — will help to throw light on this part of his life; 

Washington, October nth, 1863. 

Dear Friend : Your letters were both received, and were indeed welcome. 
Don'i mind my not answering them promptly, for you know what a wretch I 
am about such things. But you must write just as often as you conveniently 
can. Tell me all about your folks, especially the girls, and about Mr. A. Of 
course you won't forget Arthur, and always when you write to him send my 
love. Tell me about Mrs. U. and the dear little rogues. Tell Mrs. B. she 
ought to be here, hospital matron, only it is a harder pull than folks anticipate. 
You wrote about Emma, her tliinking she might and ought to come as nurse 
for the soldiers. Dear girl, I know it would be a blessed thing for the men to 
have her loving spirit and hand. But, my darling, it is a dreadful thing — you 
don't know these wounds, sickness, etc., the sad condition in which many of 
the men are brought here, and remain for days ; sometimes the wounds full of 
crawling corruption, etc. Down in the field-hospitals in front they have no 
proper care (can't have), and after a battle go for many days unattended to. 

Abby, I think often about you and the pleasant days, the visits I used to pay 
you, and how good it was always to be made so welcome. Oh, I wish I could 
come in this afternoon and have a good tea with you, and have three or four 
hours of mutual comfort, and rest and talk, and be all of us together again. Is 
Helen home and well? and what is she doing now? And you, my dear 
friend, how sorry I am to hear that your health is not rugged — but, dear Abby, 
you must not dwell on anticipations of the worst (but I know that is not your 
nature, or did not use to be). I hope this will find you feeling quite well and 
in good spirits — I feel so tremendously well myself — I will have to come and 
show myself to you, I think — I am so fat, good appetite, out considerably in 



Letter from Washingtoii, 1863. 39 

the open air, and all red and tanned worse than ever. You see, therefore, that 
my life amid these sad and death-stricken hospitals has not told at all badly 
upon me, for I am this fall so running over with health I feel as if I ought to 
go on, on that account, working among all who are deprived of it — and O how 
gladly I would bestow upon them a liberal share of mine, dear Abby, if such 
a thing were possible. 

I am continually moving around among the hospitals. One I go to oftenest 
these last three months is " Armory Square," as it is large, generally full of the 
worst wounds and sickness, and is among the least visited. To this or some other 
I never miss a day or evening. Above all, the poor boys welcome simple 
kindness, loving affection (some are so fervent, so hungering for this) — poor 
fellows, how young they are, lying there with their pale faces, and that mute 
look in the eyes. Oh, how one gets to love them, often, particular cases, so suf- 
fering, so good, so manly and yet simple. Abby, you would all smile to see me 
among them — many of them like children. Ceremony is quite discarded — 
they suffer and get exhausted and so weary — not a few are on their dying beds 
— lots of them have grown to expect, as I leave at night, that we should kiss 
each other, sometimes quite a number; I have to go round. There is little 
petting in a soldier's life in the fiekl, but, Abby, I know what is in their hearts, 
always waiting, though they may be unconscious of it themselves. 

I have a place where I buy very nice home-made biscuits, sweet crackers, 
etc. Among others, one of my ways is to get a good lot of these, and for supper, 
go through a couple of wards and give a portion to each man — next day two 
wards more, and so on. Then each marked case needs something to itself. 
I spend my evenings altogether at the hospitals — my days often. I give little 
gifts of money in small sums, which I am enabled to do — all sorts of things, 
indeed, food, clothing, letter-stamps (I write lots of letters), now and then a 
good pair of crutches or a cane, etc. Then I read to them — the whole ward 
that can walk gathers around me and listens. 

All this I tell you, my dear, because I know it will interest you. There is 
much else — many exceptions — those I leave out. I like Washington very 
well ; I have three or four hours my own work every day copying, and in 
writing letters for the press, etc. ; make enough to pay my way — live in an 
inexpensive manner anyhow. I like the mission I am at here, and as it is 
deeply holding me I shall continue. 

\_0n a second sheef\ October 15. 

Well, Abby, I will send you enough to make up lost time. I ought to have 
finished and sent off the letter last Sunday, when it was written. I have been 
unusually busy. We are having new arrivals of wounded and sick now all 
the time — some very bad cases. I have found some good friends here, a few, 
but true as steel — W. D. O'C. and wife above all the rest. He is a clerk in 
the Treasury — she is a Yankee girl. Then C. W. E. in Paymaster's Depart- 



40 



Wa/^ WhitmaJt. 



raent. He is a Boston boy, too — their friendship and assistance have been 
unswerving. 

In the hospitals among these American soldiers from East and West, North 
and South, I could not describe to you what mutual attachments, passing 
deep and tender. Some have died, but the love for them lives as long as I 
draw breath. These soldiers know how to love too, when once they have the 
right person. It is wonderful. You see I am running oi? into the clouds (per- 
haps my element). Abby, I am writing this last note this afternoon in Major 
H.'s office — he is away sick — I am here a good deal of the time alone — it is 
a dark, rainy afternoon — we don't know what is going on down in front, 
whether Meade is getting the worst of it, or not — (but the result of the big 
elections permanently cheers us) — I believe fully in Lincoln — few know the 
rocks and quicksands he has to steer through and over. I inclose you a note 
Mrs. O'C. handed me to send you, written, I suppose, upon impulse. She is 
a noble Massachusetts woman, is not very rugged in health — I am there very 
much — her husband and I are great friends. Well, I must close — the rain is 
pouring, the sky leaden, it is between 2 and 3 — I am going fo get some dinner 
and then to the hospital. Good-by, dear friends; I send my love to all. 

W. W. 

Three unflinching years of work in that terrible suspense and 
excitement of iS62-'5 changed Walt Whitman from a young to 
an old man. Under the constant and intense moral strain to 
which he was subjected (indicated in "A March in the Ranks 
Hard-press'd," and especially in "The Wound-Dresser," in 
" Drum Taps"), he eventually broke down. The doctors called 
his complaint "hospital malaria," and perhaps it was; but that 
splendid physique was sapped by labor, watching, and still 
more by the emotions, dreads, deaths, uncertainties of three years, 
before it was possible for hospital malaria or any similar cause to 
overcome it. This illness (the first he ever had in his life) in the 
hot summer of 1864, he never entirely recovered from — and never 
will. He went North for a short time, and after getting appar- 
ently better, returned to his hospital work; 

Some time before the close of the war, he was appointed 
to a clerkship in the Department of the Interior ; but was shortly 
afterwards discharged by a new Secretary, Hon. James Harlan, 
"because he was the author of an indecent dook.'^ He was im- 
mediately given an equally good place (secured through 
the good offices of W, D. O'Connor and J. Hubley Ashton) in 



An Occurrence in 1865. 41 

the office of Attorney-General James Speed. That dismissal 
brought out the pamphlet (to be given presently) called " The Good 
Gray Poet," which was adjudged at the time by Henry J. Ray- 
mond to be the most brilliant monogram in American literature. 
It is worth while to put on record here a brief memorandum of 
this dismissal. Walt Whitman at the period was dividing all 
his spare time between visits to the wounded and sick still left in 
several army hospitals at Washington, and composing the poem 
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." The morning 
after he was dismissed, his friend, Mr. Ashton, (who had himself 
sat in the President's Cabinet, and who occupied a national legal 
position), drove down to the Patent Office and had a long inter- 
view with Secretary Harlan on the subject of the dismissal. The 
Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Judge Otto, was present, but 
took no part in the discussion. Mr. A. asked why Whitman was 
dismissed, whether he had been found inattentive to his duties or 
incompetent for them. Mr. Harlan said No, there was no com- 
plaint on those points; as far as he knew, W, was a competent 
and faithful clerk. Mr. A. said, "Then what is the reason?" 
Mr. Harlan answered, "Whitman is the author oi Leaves of 
Grass.^^ Mr. A. said, "Is that the reason?" The Secretary 
said, "Yes, it is" — and then made a statement essentially to the 
following purport : He was exploring the Department after office 
hours, and in one of the rooms he found Leaves of Grass. He 
took it up and thought it so odd, that he carried it to his own 
office awhile, and examined it. There were marks by or upon 
the pieces all through the book. He found in some of these 
marked passages matter so outrageous that he determined to dis- 
charge the writer, etc. Mr. A. responded by a brief statement 
of the theory of Leaves of Grass — that any bad construction put 
upon the passages alluded to was not warranted either by the 
actual principle of the poems or the intentions of the author. 
Mr. Harlan said he couldn't help that — the author oi Leaves of 
Grass was a free lover, etc. Mr. A. said, " Mr. Harlan, I knozo 
Walt Whitman personally and well, and if you will listen to me, 
I will tell you what his life has been and is." He then went on 
with quite a long narrative. Mr. Llarlan finally said, "You have 

4 



42 Wa/t Whitman. 

changed my opinion of Mr. Whitman's personal character; but 
I shall adhere to my decision dismissing him." Mr. A. com- 
menced some further remarks, when Mr. Harlan summarily said, 
"It's no use, Mr. A., 1 will not have the man who wrote Leaves 
of Grass in this Department, if the President himself were to 
order his reinstatement. I would resign myself sooner than put 
him back." Mr. Harlan then broke into a long and vehement 
tirade against the book and its writer, to which Mr, A. made no 
reply, but bowed and took his leave. 

The following transient incidents and sketches of the man as 
he actually appeared on the streets of Washington from 1864 to 
'72, were jotted down at the time and on the spot : 

An eye-witness and participator relates, in a letter to a friend, the following 
anecdote of Abraham Lincohi : It was in the w inter-time, I think in '64, I 
went up to the White House with a friend of mine, an M. C, who had some 
business with the President. He had gone out, so we didn't stop ; but coming 
down stairs, quite near the door, we met the President coming in, and we stept 
back into the East Room, and stood near the front windows, where my friend 
had a confab with him. It didn't last more than three or four minutes; but 
there was something about a letter which my friend had handed the President, 
and Mr. Lincoln had read it, and was holding it in his hand thinking it over, 
and looking out of the window, when Walt Whitman went by, on the White 
House walk in front, quite slow, with his hands in the breast-pockets of his 
overcoat, and a sizeable felt hat on, and his head pretty well up, just as I have 
often seen him on Broadway. Mr. Lincoln asked who that was, or something 
of the kind. I spoke up, mentioning the name, Walt Whitman, and said he 
was the author of Leaves of Grass. Mr. Lincoln didn't say anything, but 
took a good look, till Whitman was quite gone by. Then he says — (I can't 
give you his way of saying it, but it was quite emphatic and odd) — " Well," 
he says, " he looks like a Man." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of ab- 
sent way, and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored. He didn't 
say any more, but began to talk again about the letter ; and in a minute or so 
we went off. 

From Burroughs'' s "Birds and Poeis." 

I give here a glimpse of him in Washington on a Pennsylvania Avenue 
and Navy Yard horse-car, toward the close of the war, one summer day at 
sundown. The car is crowded and suffocatingly hot, with many passengers 
on the rear platform, and among them a bearded, florid-faced man, elderly 
but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and 



Portraits at the Time — \'^6\-'j2. 43 

evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among 
the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the worlcing class, 
with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, 
fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to 
worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to 
everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more 
demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to 
burst into tears with weariness and vexation. The car stops at the top of 
the hill to let off most of the rear platform passengers, and the white- 
hatted man reaches inside and gently but firmly disengaging the babe from 
its stifling place in the mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the 
air. The astonished and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at 
the change, stops its screaming, and as the man adjusts it more securely to his 
breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and pushing off as far as it can, 
gives a good long look squarely in his face ; then, as if satisfied, snuggles down 
with its head on his neck, and in less than a minute is sound and peacefully 
asleep without another whimper, utterly fagged out. A square or so more, 
and the conductor, who has had an unusually hard and uninterrupted day's 
work, gets off for his first meal and relief since morning. And now the white- 
halted man, holding the slumbering babe also, acts as conductor the rest of the 
distance, keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time 
thinned out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to 
stop or go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe mean- 
while rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of his arms 
vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time to time, with the 
strap ; and the flushed mother inside has a good half-hour to breathe, and 
cool, and recover herself. 

From the Washington "Chronicle^'' May gth, i86g. 
On Pennsylvania Avenue or Seventh or Fourteenth Street, or perhaps of a 
Sunday along the suburban road toward Rock Creek, or across on Arlington 
Heights, or up the shores of the Potomac, you will meet moving along at a 
firm but moderate pace, a robust figure, six feet high, costumed in blue or gray, 
with drab hat, broad shirt collar, gray-white beard, full and curly, with face 
like a red apple, blue eyes, and a look of animal health more indicative of 
hunting or boating than the department office or author's desk. Indeed, the 
subject of our item, in his verse, his manners, and even in his philosophy, evi- 
dently draws from, and has reference to, the influences of sea and sky, and 
woods and prairies, with their laws, and man in his relations to them, while 
neither the conventional parlor nor library has cast its spells upon him. 

From the New York "Evening Alail^'' Oct. I'jth, 1870. 
The papers here have all paragraphed Walt Whitman's return to town and 
to his desk- in the Attorney-General's office, after quite a long vacation. His 



44 Wall Whitman. 

figure is daily to be seen here moving around in the open air, especially fine 
mornings and evenings, observing, listening to, or sociably talking with all sorts 
of people, policemen, drivers, market men, old women, the blacks, or digni- 
taries; or perhaps, giving some small alms to beggars, the maimed, or organ- 
grinders; or stopping to caress little children, of whom he is very fond. He 
takes deep interest in all the news, foreign and domestic. At the commence, 
ment of the present war in Europe he was strongly German, but is now the 
ardent friend of the French, and enthusiastically supports them and their 
Repul)lic. Here at home he goes for general amnesty and oblivion to Seces- 
sionists. He speaks sharply of the tendency of the Republican party to con- 
centrate all power in Congress, and make its legislation absolutely sovereign, 
as against the equal claims, in their spheres, of the Presidency, the Judiciary, 
and the single States. 

Altogether, perhaps, "the good, gray poet" is rightly located here. Our 
wide spaces, great edifices, the breadth of our landscape, the ample vistas, the 
splendor of our skies, night and day, with the national character, the memo- 
ries of Washington and Lincoln, and others that might be named, make our 
city, above all others, the one where he filly belongs. 

Walt Whitman is now in his fifty-second year, hearty and blooming, tall, 
with white beard and long hair. The older he gets the more cheerful and 
gay-hearted he grows. 

From a letter in Burroughs' s "Notcs^"' N'ov. sSt/i, i8jo. 

.... You ask for some particulars of my friend Wliitman. You know I 
first fell in with him years ago in the army. We then lived awhile in the same 
tent, and now I occupy the adjoining room to his. I can, therefore, gratify 
your curiosity. He is a large-looking man. While in tlie market the other day 
with a party of us, we were all weighed ; his weight was 200 pounds. But I 
will just start with him like with the day. He is fond of the sun, and at this 
season, soon as it is well up, shining in his room, he is out in its beams for a 
cold-water bath with hand and sponge, after a brisk use of the flesh-brush. 
Then blithely singing — his singing often pleasantly wakes me — he proceeds to 
finish his toilet, about which he is quite particular. Then forth for a walk in 
the open air, or perhaps some short exercise in the gymnasium. Then to break- 
fast — no sipping and nibbling — he demolishes meat, eggs, rolls, toast, roast 
potatoes, coffee, buckwheat cakes, at a terrible rate. Then walking moder- 
ately to his desk in the Attorney-General's office — a pleasant desk, w ith large 
south window at his left, looking away down the Potomac, and across to 
Virginia on one side. 

He is at present in first-rate bodily health. Of his mind you must judge 
from his writings, as I have sent them to you. He is not what is called cere- 
monious or polite, but I have noticed invariably kind and tolerant with chil- 
dren, servants, laborers, and the illiterate. He gives freely to the poor, accord- 



18/3 — ^ Paralytic stroke. 45 

ing to his means. He can be freezing in manner, and knows how to fend off 
bores. Sometimes he and I only — sometimes a larger party of us — go off on 
rambles of several miles out in the country, or over the hills ; sometimes we go 
nights, when the moon is fine. On such occasions he contributes his part to 
the general fun. You might hear his voice, half in sport, declaiming some 
passage from a poem or play, and his song or laugh about as often as any, 
sounding in the open air. 

Walt Whitman continued to live in Washington until 1873. 
He had toward the last a salary of $1600 a year. He exercised 
the strictest economy, almost parsimony, in his own personal 
living, spending probably less than a quarter of his income upon 
himself, putting by about one-third of the remainder, and using 
the rest, first for a dear relative at home, and then for needy per- 
sons and the inmates of the army hospitals, his visits to which he 
continued as long as they remained in the Capital. He always 
looked well, and the greater part of the time felt well, but his 
health was never at the stage of perfection and unconsciousness 
it had been before his illness in 1S64, and he suffered occasional 
attacks of actual and sometimes severe sickness. 

This condition of depressed vitality culminated in a para- 
lytic seizure. He told me (one day in 1880) how it came on, 
almost or exactly in the following words: "On the night of 
'the 22d of February, 1873, ^ "^^^^ ^^ the Treasury building in 
' Washington ; outside it was raining, sleeting, and quite cold 
'and dark. The office was comfortable, and I had a good fire. 
'I was lazily reading Bulwer's * What Will He Do With It?' 
'But I did not feel well, and put aside the book several times. 
' I remained at the office until pretty late. My lodging-room 
' was about a hundred yards down the street. At last I got up 
' to go home. At the door of the Treasury one of the friendly 
' group of guards asked me what ailed me, and said I looked 
'quite ill. He proposed to let a man take his place while he 
' would convoy me home. I said, No, I can go well enough. 
'He. again said he would go with me, but I again declined. 
' Then he went down the steps and stood at the door with his 
' lantern until I reached the house where I lived. I walked up 
' to my room and went to bed and to sleep — woke up about 



46 JVaU Whitman. 

"three or four o'clock and found that I could not move my left 
" arm or leg — did not feel particularly uneasy about it — was in 
'' no pain and even did not seem to be very ill — thought it would 
"pass off — went to sleep again and slept until daylight. Then, 
" however, I found that I could not get up — could not move. 
"After several hours, some friends came in, and they immedi- 
"ately sent for a doctor — fortunately a very good one, Dr. W. 
" B. Drinkard. He looked very grave — thought my condition 
" markedly serious. I did not think so: I supposed the attack 
" would pass, off soon — but it did not." 

And it never has passed off, and never will, although he has 
regained the use of his limbs to a considerable degree. This 
first attack kept him down for over two months, at the end of 
which time he was growing perceptibly better, when, on 23d 
May, the same year, his mother died somewhat suddenly. (In 
Camden, New Jersey. He was present at her death-bed.) That 
event was a terrible blow to him, and after its occurrence he 
became much worse. He left Washington for good, and took 
up his residence in Camden. 

And now for several years, 1S73, '74, '75, his life hung upon 
a thread. Though'he suffered at times severely, he never became 
dejected or impatient. It was said by one of his friends that in 
that combination of illness, poverty, and old age, Walt Whitman 
has been more grand than in the full vigor of his manhood. 
For along with illness, pain, and the burden of age, he soon had 
to bear poverty also. A little while after he became mcapacitated 
by illness, he was discharged from his Government clerkship, 
and everything like an income entirely ceased. As to the profits 
of Leaves of Grass, they had never been much, and now two 
men, in succession, in New York (T. O'K. and C. P. S.), in 
whose hands the sale of the book, on commission, had been 
placed, took advantage of his helplessness to embezzle the 
amounts due — (they calculated that death would soon settle the 
score and rub it out). So that, although I hardly ever heard him 
speak of them, I know that during those four years Walt Whitman 
had to bear the imminent prospect of death, great pain and suf- 



Illness of i874-'5-'6. 47 

fcring at times, poverty, his poetic enterprise a failure, and the 
face of the public either clouded in contempt or turned away 
with indifference. If a man can go through such a trial as this 
without despair or misanthropy — if he can maintain a good 
heart, can preserve absolute self-respect, and as absolutely the 
respect, love, and admiration of the few who thoroughly know 
him — then he has given proofs I should say of personal heroism 
of the first order. It was, perhaps, needed that Walt Whitman 
should afford such proofs ; at all events he has afforded them. 
What he was, how he lived, kept himself up during those yeSrs, 
and how at the end partially recuperated, is so well set forth by 
himself in Specimen Days, that it would be mere impertinence for 
any one else to attempt to retell the tale. The illness his friends 
looked upon with so much dread has borne fruit in one of the sanest 
and sweetest of books, the brightest and halest " Diary of an In- 
valid" ever written — a book unique in being the expression of 
strength in infirmity — the wisdom of weakness — so bright and 
translucent, at once of the earth, earthy, and spiritual as of the 
sky and stars. Other books of the invalid's room require to be 
read with the blinds drawn down and the priest on the threshold ; 
but this sick man's chamber is the lane, and by the creek or 
sea-shore — always with the fresh air and the open sky overhead. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE POET IN i^^o.— PERSONNEL, ETC. 

»This chapter has been mainly written while Walt Whitman 
visited at the house of the writer in Canada, or while he and I 
were travelling together through the Provinces of Ontario or 
Quebec, or on the Lakes, or the St. Lawrence or Saguenay Rivers ; 
and the greater part of it while we were in the same room. 

First, as to his personal appearance, noted at the time. 
On the 31st of May, 1880, Walt Whitman was sixty-one years 
of age. At first sight he looked much older, so that he was often 
supposed to be seventy or even eighty. He is six feet in height, 
and quite straight. He weighs nearly two hundred pounds. His 
body and limbs are full-sized and well-proportioned. His head 
is large and rounded in every direction, the top a little higher 
than a semicircle from the front to the back would make it. 
Though his face and head give the appearance of being plenti- 
fully supplied with hair, the crown is moderately bald ; on the 
sides and back the hair long, very fine, and nearly snow-white. 
The eyebrows are highly arched, so that it is a long distance 
from the eye to the centre of the eyebrow — (this is the facial 
feature that strikes one most at first sight). The eyes themselves 
are light blue, not large, — indeed, in proportion to the head and 
face they seemed to me rather small ; they are dull and heavy, 
not expressive — what expression they have is kindness, compo- 
sure, suavity. The eyelids are full, the upper commonly droops 
nearly half over the globe of the eye. The nose is broad, strong, 
and quite straight ; it is full-sized, but not large in proportion to 
the rest of the face ; it does not descend straight from the fore- 
head, but dips down somewhat between the eyes with a long 
sweep. The mouth is full-sized, the lips full. The sides and 



Face — Senses — Physique. 49 

lower part of the face are covered with a fine white beard, which 
is long enough to come down a little way on the breast. The 
upper lip bears a heavy mustache. The ear is very large, espe- 
cially long from above downwards, heavy, and remarkably hand- 
some. I believe all the^oet's senses are exceptionally acute, his 
hearing especially so ; no sound or modulation of sound per- 
ceptible to others escapes him, and he seems to hear many things 
that to ordinary folk are inaudible. I have heard him speak of 
hearing the grass grow and the trees coming out in leaf. In the 
"Song of Myself" he mentions the "bustle of growing wheat." 
And as to scent, he says in Specimen Days, " There is a scent in 
everything, even the snow ; no two places, hardly any two hours, 
anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from 
midnight, winter from summer, or a windy spell from a still 
one." His cheeks are round and smooth. His face had no lines 
that expressed care, or weariness, or age — it was the white hair 
and beard, and his feebleness in walking (due to the paralysis) 
that made him appear old. The habitual expression of his face 
is repose, but there is a well-marked firmness and decision. I 
have never seen his look, even momentarily, express con- 
tempt, or any vicious feeling. I have never known him to sneer 
at any person or thing, or to manifest in any way or degree either 
alarm or apprehension, though he has in my presence been 
placed in circumstances that would have caused both in most men. 
His complexion is peculiar, a bright maroon tint, which, con- 
trasting with his white hair and beard, makes an impression very 
striking. His body is not white like that of all others whom I 
have seen of the English or Teutonic stock — it is a delicate but 
well-marked rose-color. All his features are large and massive, 
but so proportioned as not to look heavy. His face is the noblest 
I have ever seen. 

No description can give any idea of the extraordinary physical 
attractiveness of the man. I do not speak now of the affection 
of friends and of those who are much with him, but of the mag- 
netism exercised by him upon people who merely see him for a 
few minutes or pass him on the street. An intimate friend of 
the author's, after knowing Walt Whitman a few days, said in a 

5 



50 Wait Whiwtan, 

letter: "As for myself, it seems to me now that I have always 
known him and loved him." And in another letter, written 
from a town where the poet had been staying for a few days, the 
same person says : "Do you know, every one who met him here 
seems to love him." 

The following is the experience of a person well known to the 
present writer. He called on Walt Whitman and spent an hour 
at his home in Camden, in the autumn of 1877. He had never 
seen the poet before, but he had been profoundly reading his 
works for some years. He said that Walt Whitman only spoke 
to him about a hundred words altogether, and these quite ordi- 
nary and commonplace ; that he did not realize anything peculiar 
while with him, but shortly after leaving a state of mental exalta- 
tion set in, which he could only describe by comparing to 
slight intoxication by champagne, or to falling in love ! And 
this exaltation, he said, lasted at least six weeks in a clearly 
marked degree, so that, for at least that length of time, he was 
plainly different from his ordinary self. Neither, he said, did it 
then or since pass away, though it ceased to be felt as something 
new and strange, but became a permanent element in his life, a 
strong and living force (as he described it), making for purity and 
happiness. I may add that this person's whole life has been 
changed by that contact (no doubt the previous reading of Leaves 
of Grass also), his temper, character, entire spiritual being, outer 
life, conversation, etc., elevated and purified in an extraordinary 
degree. He tells me that at first he used often to speak to friends 
and acquaintances of his feeling for Walt Whitman and the 
Leaves, but after a time he found that he could not make himself 
understood, and that some even thought his mental balance im- 
paired. He gradually learned to keep silence upon the subject, 
but the feeling did not abate, nor its influence upon his life grow 
less. 

Walt Whitman's dress was always extremely plain. He usually 
wore in pleasant weather a light-gray suit of good woollen cloth. 
The only thing peculiar about his dress was that he had no neck- 
tie at any time,, and always wore shirts with very large turn- 
down collars, the button at the neck some five or six inches 



Dress — Ideal of Life — Temper. 51 

lower than usual, so that the throat and upper part of the breast 
were exposed. In all other respects he dressed in a substantial, 
neat, plain, common way. Everything he wore, and everything 
about him, was always scrupulously clean. His clothes might 
(and often did) show signs of wear, or they might be torn or have 
holes worn in them ; but they never looked soiled. Indeed, an 
exquisite aroma of cleanliness has always been one of the special 
features of the man ; it has always belonged to his clothes, his 
breath, his whole body, his eating and drinking, his conversation, 
and no one could know him for an hour without seeing that it 
penetrated his mind and life, and was in fact the expression of a 
purity which was physical as much as moral, and moral as much 
as physical. 

Walt Whitman, in my talks with him at that time, always dis- 
claimed any lofty intention in himself or his poems. If you 
accepted his explanations they were simple and commonplace. 
But when you came to think about these explanations, and to 
enter into the spirit of them, you found that the simple and com- 
monplace with him included the ideal and the spiritual. So it 
may be said that neither he nor his writings are growths of the 
ideal from the real, but are the actual real lifted up into the ideal. 
With Walt Whitman, his body, his outward life, his inward 
spiritual existence and his poetry, were all one ; in every respect 
each tallied the other, and any one of them could always be in- 
ferred from any other. He said to me one day (I forget now in 
what connection), " I have imagined a life which should be that 
" of the average man in average circumstances, and still grand, 
"heroic." There is no doubt that such an ideal has been con- 
stantly before his mind, and that all he has done, said, written, 
thought and felt, have been and are, from moment to moment, 
moulded upon it. His manner is curiously calm and self-contained. 
He seldom becomes excited in conversation, or at all events sel- 
dom shows excitement ; he rarely raises his voice or uses any ges- 
tures. I never knew him to be in a bad temper. He seemed 
always pleased with those about him. He did not generally wait 
for a formal introduction; upon meeting any person for the first 



52 IVaU Whitman. 

time, he very likely stepped forward, held out his hand (either left 
or right whichever happened to be disengaged), and the person 
and he were acquainted at once. People could not tell why they 
liked him, they said there was "something attractive about him," 
that he " had a great deal of personal magneti-sm," or made some 
other vague explanation that meant nothing. One very clever 
musical person, who spent a couple of days in my house while 
Walt Whitman was there, said to me on going away, " I know 
what it is, it is his wonderful voice that makes it so pleasant to be 
with him." I said, "Yes, perhaps it is, but where did his voice 
get that charm ? " 

Though he would sometimes not touch a book for a week, he 
generally spent a part (though not a large part) of each day in 
reading. Perhaps he would read on an average a couple of hours 
a day. He seldom read any book deliberately through, and 
there was no more apparent system about his reading than in 
anything else that he did, that is to say there was no system 
about it at all. If he sat in the library an hour, he would have 
half a dozen to a dozen volumes about him, on the table, on 
chairs and on the floor. He seemed to read a i^sw pages here 
and a few there, and pass from place to place, from volume to 
volume, doubtless pursuing some clue or thread of his own. Some- 
times (though very seldom) he would get sufficiently interested 
in a volume to read it all. I think he read almost if not quite 
the whole of Renouf's " Egypt," and Brusch-bey's "Egypt," but 
these cases were exceptional. In his way of reading he dipped 
into histories, essays, metaphysical, religious and scientific trea- 
tises, novels and poetry (though I think he read less poetry than 
anything else). He read no language but English, yet I believe 
he knew a great deal more French, German and Spanish, than 
he would own to. But if you took his own word for it, he knew 
very little indeed on any subject. 

His favorite occupation seemed to be strolling or sauntering about 
outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, 
the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening 
to the birds, the crickets, the tree-frogs, the wind in the trees, 
and all the hundreds of natural sounds and shows. It was evident 



Singing — Reciting Poetry. 53 

that these things gave him a pleasure that ordinary people never 
experience. Until I knew the man, it had not occurred to me 
(though I am moderately fond of outdoor life myself and have 
read what most of the poets say on the subject) that any one 
could derive so much absolute happiness and ample fulfilment 
from these things, as he evidently did. He himself never spoke 
of all this pleasure. I dare say he hardly thought of it, but any 
one who watched him could see plainly that in his case it was 
real and deep. 

He had a way of singing, generally in an undertone, wherever 
he was or whatever he was doing when alone. You would hear 
him the first thing in the morning while he was taking his bath and 
dressing (he would then perhaps sing out in full, ballads or martial 
songs), and a large part of the time that he sauntered outdoors 
during the day he sang, usually tunes without words, or a formless 
recitative. Sometimes he would recite poetry, generally I tiiink 
from Shakespeare or Homer, once in a while from Bryant or 
others. His way of rendering poetry was peculiar but effective. 
I remember the " Midnight Visitor" from the French poet 
Murger, also Tennyson's " Ulysses," and Schiller's "Diver." * 



* A letter from Camden, in the " Springfield Republican," July 23, 1875, says : The 
Camden mechanics and young men have a flourishing literary society here, called the " Walt 
Whitman Club ; " and some weeks since, they gave a musical and other entertainment for the 
benefit of the poor fund, at which Wlatman readily appeared as reader of one of his own 
poems. There was a crowded house, the report in the local paper saying, " Probably the 
best part of the audience drawn to the entertainment by a mixture of wonder and uncertainty 
what sort of a being Walt Whitman really was, and what sort of a thing one of his poems 
might prove to be." The report goes on to give the following account of his appearance and 
reading: A large, lame old man, six feet tall, dressed in a complete suit of English gray, 
hobbled slowly out to view, with the assistance of a stout buckthorn staff. Though ill from 
paralysis, the clear blue eyes, complexion of transparent red, and fulness of figure so well 
known to many New Yorkers and Washingtonians of the past 15 years, and in Camden and 
Philadelphia of late, all remain about the same. With his snowy hair and fleecy beard, and 
in a manner which singularly combined strong emphasis with the very realization of self- 
composure, simplicity and ease, Mr. Whitman, for it was he (though he might be taken at 
first sight for 75 or 80, he is in fact not yet 57), proceeded to read, sitting, his poem of the 
"Mystic Trumpeter." His voice is firm, magnetic, and with a certain peculiar quality we 
heard an admiring auditor call unaffectedness. Its range is baritone, merging into bass. He 
reads very leisurely, makes frequent pauses or gaps, enunciates with distinctness, and uses 
few gestures, but those very significant. Is he eloquent and dramatic? No, not in the con- 
ventional sense, as illustrated by the best known stars of the pulpit, court-room, or the stage ■ 
— for the bent of his reading, in fact the whole idea of it, is evidently to first form an 
enormous mental fund, as it were, within the regions of the chest, and heart, and lungs — a 



His fondness for Children. 5 5 

tion for him. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so 
many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural 
objects seemed to have a charm for him ; all sights and sounds, 
outdoors and indoors, seemed to please him. He appeared to 
like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women and children 
he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), 
but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that 
he liked others also. He was here entirely natural and uncon- 
ventional. When he did express a preference for any person 
(which was very seldom) he would indicate it in some indirect 
way; for instance, I have known him to say, "Good-bye, my 
love," to a young married lady he had only seen half a dozen 
times. 

He was especially fond of children, and all children liked and 
trusted him at once. Often the little ones, tired out and fretful, 
the moment he took them up and caressed them, would cease 
crying, and perhaps go to sleep in his arms. One day in the 
summer of 1880, several ladies, the poet and myself, attended a 
picnic given to hundreds of poor children in London. During 
the day I lost sight of my friend for perhaps an hour, and when 
I found him again he was sitting in a quiet nook by the river 
side, with a rosy-faced child of four or five years' old, tired out 
and sound asleep in his lap.* 

For young and old his touch had a charm that cannot be de- 
scribed, and if it could, the description would not be believed 
except by those who know him either personally or through 
Leaves of Grass, This charm (physiological more than psycholog- 

* Burial of Little Walter Whitman. — Among the late mortality in Camden, from 
heat, to young children, Colonel George W. Whitman and wife lost their infant son and only 
child Walter, less than a year of age. The funeral was last Friday. In the middle of the 
room, in its white coffin, lay the dead babe, strewed with a profusion of fresh geranium leaves 
and some tuberoses. For over an hour all the young ones of the neighborhood kept coming 
silently in groups or couples or singly, quite a stream surrounding the coffin. Near the 
corpse, in a great chair, sat Walt Whitman, the poet, quite enveloped by children, holding 
one encircled by either arm, and a beautiful little girl on his lap. The little girl looked curi- 
ously at the spectacle, and then inquiringly up in the old man's face. " You don't know what 
it IS, do you, my dear?" said he — adding, " We don't either." Of the children surrounding 
the coffin many were mere babes, and had to be lifted up to look. . There was no sermon, no 
ceremony, everything natural and informal, but, perhaps, there never was a more silently 
eloquent, simple, solemn and touching sight. — Philadelphia Ledger, July zo, 1876. 



56 ^V'r/t Whitma>i. 

ical), if imderstood, would explain the whole mystery of the man, 
and how lie produced such effects not only upon the well, but 
among the sick and wounded. 

It is certain also, perhaps contrary to what I have given, that 
there is another phase, and a very real one, to the basis of his 
character. An elderly gentleman I talked with (he is a portrait 
painter and a distant relative of the poet), who has been much 
with, and knew him, particularly through the years of his middle 
age and later (1845 to 1S70), tells me that Walt Whitman, in the 
elements of his character, had deepest sternness and hauteur, not 
easily aroused, but coming forth at times, and then well under- 
stood by those who know him best as something not to be trifled 
with. The gentleman alluded to (he is a reader and thorough 
?icc(i\i\.tr o{ Leaves of Grass) zgrtcs with me in my delineation 
of his benevolence, evenness, and tolerant optimism, yet insists 
that at the inner framework of the poet has always been, as he ex- 
presses it, "a combination of hot blood and fighting qualities." 
He says my outline applies more especially to his later years; that 
Walt Whitman has gradually brought to the front the attributes I 
dwell upon, and given them control. His theory is, in almost his 
own words, that there are two natures in Walt Whitman. The one 
is of immense suavity, self-control, a mysticism like the occasional 
fits of Socrates, and a pervading Christ-like benevolence, tender- 
ness, and sympathy (the sentiment of the intaglio frontispiece 
portrait, which I showed him, and he said he had seen exactly 
that look in ''the old man," and more than once, during 1863- 
'64, though he never observed it before or since). But these 
qualities, though he has enthroned them, and for many years 
governed his life by them, are duplicated by far sterner ones. 
No doubt he has mastered the latter, but he has them. How 
"could Walt Whitman (said my interlocutor) have taken the atti- 
tude toward evil, and things evil, which is behind every page of 
his utterance in Leaves of Grass, from first to last — so different 
on that subject from every writer known, new or old — unless he 
enfolded all that evil within him? (To all of which I give place 
here as not essentially inconsistent — if true — with my own the- 



After the rest, a repellent side. 57 

ory of the poet's nature, and also because I am determined to 
take the fullest view of him, and from all sides.) 

In an article in the "Galaxy" for December, 1866, John 
Burroughs said : 

Lethargic during an interview, passive and receptive, an admirable list- 
ener, never in a hurry, with the air of one who has plenty of leisure, 
always in perfect repose, simple and direct in manners, a lover of plain, 
common people, " meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms," tem-. 
perate, chaste, sweet-breath'd, tender and affectionate, of copious friendsliip, 
with a large, summery, paternal soul that shines in all his ways and looks, 
he is by no means the " rough " certain people have been so willing to 
believe. Fastidious as a high caste Brahmin in his food and personal 
neatness and cleanliness, well dressed, with a gray, open throat, a deep 
sympathetic voice, a kind, genial look, the impression he makes upon you 
is that of the best blood and breeding. He reminds one of the first men, 
the beginners ; has a primitive, outdoor look — not so much from being in 
the open air as from the texture and quality of his make — a look as of 
the earth, the sea, or the mountains, and " is usually taken," says a late 
champion of his cause, " for some great mechanic, or stevedore, or sea- 
man, or grand laborer of one kind or another." His physiognomy pre- 
sents very marked features — features of the true antique pattern, almost 
oV)solete in modern faces — seen in the strong, square bridge of his nose, 
his high arching brows, and the absence of all bulging in his forehead — 
a face approximating in type to the statued Greek. He does not mean 
intellect merely, but life; and one feels that he must arrive at his results 
rather by sympathy and absorption than by hard intellectual processes — by 
tlie effluence of power rather than by direct and total application of it. 

In conclusion, I suppose I ought to say that there is another 
side to the picture, the indispensable exception that proves the 
rule. This man, the sight of whom excites such extraordinary affec- 
tion, whose voice has for most of those who hear it such a wonder- 
ful charm, whose touch possesses a power which no words can 
express — in rare instances, this man, like the magnet, repels as 
well as attracts. As there are those who instinctively love him, 
so there are others, here and there, who instinctively dislike him. 
The furious assaults of the press during twenty-five years, the 
disgraceful action of Secretary Harlan in 1865, the continuous 
refusal of publishers to publish his poems, and of booksellers to 
sell them, the legal threats in 1882 of the Massachusetts Attor- 



58 WaU Whitman. 

ney-General, voiced by Boston's District Attorney Stevens — the 
cowardly throwing up of their contract by J. R. Osgood & Co. — 
persecution by the wretched Anthony Comstock and his pitiful 
"Society for the Suppression of Vice" — with all the prevalent 
doubt and freezing coldness of the literary classes and organs up 
to this hour — are fitting outcomes and illustrations of that other 
side. As his poetic utterances are so ridiculous to many, even 
his personal appearance, in not a kw cases, arouses equally sar- 
castic remark. His large figure, his red face, his copious beard, 
his loose and free attire, his rolling and unusually ample shirt- 
collar, without neck-tie and always wide open at the throat, all 
meet at times (and not so seldom, either,) with jeers and explosive 
laughter. Pages and extracts in this volume (see Appendix) give 
many samples of incredible misapprehension and malignance to- 
ward the book Leaves of Grass. They could be fully tallied with 
records of equal rancor, foulness, and falsehood against Walt 
Whitman personally. That such exist, and will probably con- 
tinue, is doubtless according to a morbid attribute of humanity, 
and one of its most mysterious laws. A Washington reviewer 
some years since said on this subject : 

Walt Whitman personally is a study, affording the strongest lights and shades. 
With all his undoubted instincts of perfection, he by no means sets up 
for a saint, but is a full-blooded fellow, with a life showing past blunders and 
missteps, and a spirit not only tolerant toward weak and sinful mortals, but 
probably a secret leaning toward them. Then he has not escaped the fate of 
personalities who rouse public attention, and canards, by originality and inde- 
pendence. Perhaps, too, he has that affectation sometimes seen — a grim 
amusement in tacitly taunting and inviting them. Singularly simple and 
plain, few men are so beloved as he — few have ever so magnetized; yet none 
afford more temptation to caricature or bogus anecdotes. The late summing- 
up of a first-rate judge of human nature, that personal knowledge of him un- 1 
erringly dissipates such fictions, is the best disposal of the whole matter. 



CHAPTER III. 
HIS CONVERSATION. 

He did not talk much. Sometimes, while remaining cheery 
and good-natured, he would speak very little all day. His con- 
versation, when he did talk, was at all times easy and uncon- 
strained. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never 
spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, 
sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself 
or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in those 
sharp criticisms, slanders, and the opposition of enemies. He 
said that his critics were quite right, that behind what his friends 
saw he was not at all what he seemed, and that from the point 
of view of its foes, his book deserved all the hard things they 
could say of it — and that he himself undoubtedly deserved them 
and plenty more. , 

When I first knew Walt Whitman I used to think that he 
watched himself, and did not allow his tongue to give expression 
to feelings of fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. 
It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could 
be absent in him. After long observation, however, and talking 
to others who had known him many years, I satisfied myself that 
such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. 

His deep, clear, and earnest voice makes a good part, though 
not all, of the charm of the simplest things he says ; a voice not 
characteristic of any special nationality, accent, or dialect. If 
he said (as he sometimes would involuntarily on stepping to the 
door and looking out), "Oh, the beautiful sky!" or "Oh, the 
beautiful grass !" the words produced the effect of sweet music. 

One evening he spoke quite freely of his British friends. Pro- 
fessor Dowden, Addington Symonds, Tennyson (who had sent 
him a letter warmly inviting him over there to T.'s house), Pro- 



6o Walt Whitman. 

fessor Clifford, and other and younger ones. I remember his 
glowing words of esteem and affection for Mrs. Gilchrist, and 
also for Robert Buchanan (whose denunciations and scathing 
appeal in the London papers at the time of the poet's darkest 
persecution, sickness, and poverty, made such a flutter in 1876).* 

He said one day when talking about some fine scenery, and the 
desire to go and see it (and he himself was very fond of new 
scenery), "After all, the great lesson is that no special natural 
"sights, not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite, or anything else, is more 
"grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, 
" earth and sky, the common trees and grass." Properly under- 
stood, I believe this suggests the central teaching of his writings 
and life, namely, that the commonplace is the grandest of all 
things ; that the exceptional in any line is no finer, better, or 
more beautiful than the usual, and that what is really wanting is 
not that we should possess something we have not at present, but 
that our eyes should be opened to see and our hearts to feel what 
we all have. 

On the evening of the ist of August, 1880, as we were sitting 
together on the veranda of the "Hub House," among the 
Thousand Islands of the St. 'Lawrence, I said to Walt Whitman, 
" It seems to me surprising that you never married. Did you 
remain single of set purpose?" He said, "No, I have hardly 
" done anything in my life of set purpose, in the way you mean." 
After a minute, he added, " I suppose the chief reason why I 
"never married must have been an overmastering passion for 
"entire freedom, unconstraint ; I had an instinct against form- 
" ing ties that would bind me." I said, " Yes, it was the instinct 
of self-preservation. Had you married at the usual age, Leaves 
of Grass would never have been written." 

* He who wanders through the solitudes of far-off Uist or lonely Donegal may often behold 
the Golden Eagle sick to death, worn with age or famine, or with both, passing with weary 
waft of wing from promontory to promontory, from peak to peak, pursued by a crowd of 
prosperous rooks and crows, which fall screaming back whenever the noble bird turns his 
indignant head, and which follow frantically once more, hooting behind him, whenever he 
wends again upon his way. The rook is a " recognized" bird ; the crow is perfectly " estab- 
lished." But for the Eagle, when he sails aloft in the splendor of his strength, who shall per- 
fectly discern and measure his flight? — Robert Buchanan, London Daily News, March 13. 
1876. 



His Conversation. 6i 

The same evening we talked about the use of alcohol, and we 
agreed that as mankind advanced in a noble individuality they 
would give up stimulants of all kinds as being always in the long 
run a mistake and unprofitable. He said, "The capital argument 
"against alcohol, that which must eventually condemn its use, 
"is this, that it takes away all the reserved control, the power 
"of mastership, and therefore offends against that splendid 
"pride in himself or herself whicli is fundamental in every man 
"or woman worth anything." 

One day talking about religious experiences, Walt Whitman 
said, "I never had any particular religious experiences — never 
"felt that I needed to be saved — never felt the need of spiritual 
"regeneration — never had any fear of hell, or distrust of the 
"scheme of the universe. I always felt that it was perfectly 
"right and for the best." 

On the 9th of August we were together at the Falls of Mont- 
morenci, near the foot of the stairs. There had been a good 
deal of rain, the river was high, and the falls finer than usual. I 
said, " Now, Walt, put that in a poem just as it is ; if that could 
be done it would be magnificent." He said, "All such things 
" need at least the third or fourth remove; in itself it would be 
" too much for nine out of every ten readers. Very few " (he 
said, a little mischievously, perhaps), "care for natural objects 
"themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled forests, 
"weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit 
"for reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, 
"marble, or bronze. The real things are, far more than they 
"would own, disgusting, revolting to them. This" (he added, 
half quizzically) "may be a reason of the dislike of Leaves of 
''^ Grass by the majority." 

Walt Whitman, however, never mentions Leaves of Grass, 
unless first spoken to on the subject ; then he talks about it, and 
his purpose in writing it, as of any ordinary matter. I have 
never heard him myself say much on the subject, but I will give 
here some of his words taken from the "Springfield Republican," 
reported, I have reason to know, as they were said impromptu : 
"Well, I'll suggest to you what my poems have grown out of, 



62 IVaU Whitman. 

" since you want to know so bad. I understand as well as any 
"one they are ambitious and egotistical, but I hope the founda- 
** tions are far deeper. We have to-day no songs, no expressions 
" from the poets' and artists' points of view, of science, of Ameri- 
"can democracy, and of the modern. Tlie typical war spirit of 
"the antique world, and its heroes and leaders, have been fully 
"depicted and preserved in Homer, and since. Rapt ecstasy and 
" Oriental veneration are in the Bible ; the literature of those 
*• qualities will never, can never, ascend any higher. The ages 
"of feudalism and European chivalry, through their results and 
" personalities, are in Shakespeare. But where is the work, where 
"the poem, in which the entirely different but fully equal glories 
" and practice of our own democratic times, of the scientific, 
" the materialistic, are held in solution, fused in human person- 
" ality and emotions, and fully expressed ? If, for instance, by 
" some vast, instantaneous convulsion, American civilization 
" were lost, where is the poem, or imaginative work in any depart- 
" ment, which, if saved from the wreck, would preserve the char- 
"acteristics and memories of it to succeeding worlds of men? 

" You speak of Shakespeare and the relative poetical demands 
"and opportunities, then and now — my own included. Shake- 
" speare had his boundless rich materials, all his types and char- 
" acters, the main threads of his plots, fully ripened and waiting 
" to be woven in. The feudal world had flourished for centuries — 
" gave him the perfect king, the lord, all that is heroic and grace- 
" ful and proud — gave him the exquisite transfigurations of caste, 
"sifted and selected out of the huge masses, as if for him, choice 
"specimens of proved and noble gentlemen, varied and romantic 
"incidents of the military, social, political and ecclesiastical 
" history of a thousand years, all ready to fall into his plots and 
" pages. Then the time comes for the evening of feudalism. A 
"new power has advanced, and the flush, the pomp, the accumu- 
" lated materials of those ages take on the complex gorgeousness 
"of sunset. At this point Shakespeare appears. By amazing 
" opportuneness, his faculty, his power, the feudalistic demands 
" on him, combine, and he is their poet. But for my poems, what 
" have 1 ? I have all to make — have really to fashion all, except 



His Conversation. 63 

" my own intentions — have to constructively sing the ideal yet 
" unformed America. Shakespeare sang the past, the formed ; 
" I project the unformed, the future — depend on the future, and 
" have to make my own audience. 

"Most of the great poets are impersonal; I am personal. 
" They portray their endless characters, events, passions, love- 
" plots, but seldom or never mention themselves. In my poems 
" all concentrates in, radiates from, revolves around myself. I 
" have but one central figure, the general human personality 
" typified in myself. Only I am sure my book inevitably necessi- 
" tates that its reader transpose him or herself into that central 
" position, and become the actor, experiencer, himself or herself, 
"of every page, every aspiration, every line." 

In our family groups and sociable company, he was fond of 
telling little funny stories, bringing in comical sayings, generally 
trivial in themselves (sometimes quite venerable), deriving most 
of their charm — and they were very amusing — from special apt- 
ness to the case, and from his manner of telling them. In St. 
Louis, where he was a half invalid, one winter, he was in the 
habit of visiting, twice a week, the kindergarten schools, and 
spending an hour at a time among the young children, who 
gathered in swarms about him to listen to " The three Cats who 
took a Walk," or some other juvenile story. Lingering with us 
all at the table after tea was a favorite recreation with him. The 
following are some examples of his dry anecdotes, generally told 
to groups of little or larger children : 

There was a very courageous but simple old woman, and some 
chaps agreed upon a plan to frighten her. One of them dressed 
up in black, with horns and tail, and made himself very frightful. 
In this rig he appeared to the old woman at night and said in a 
terrible voice, " Look at me ! " The old lady calmly put on her 
spectacles, looked him steadily all over and said, " Who are you? " 
*' I am the devil !" said he, in a deep voice. " You the devil, 
are you? " said the old woman composedly ; then calmly, after a 
pause — '■^ poor creetur .-'" 

He was fond of the well-known story about a sailor ship- 



64 WaU Whitvian. 

wrecked upon a strange coast, who wandering inland after a long 
jaunt saw a gibbet holding a murderer's corpse, and immediately 
burst out, " Thank God, at last I am in a Christian land." 

A dry expression of his, talking about some one was, " Well, 
he has the good sense to like me." He used to tell about some 
man who said, when it was alleged that a certain fact was histori- 
cal, "Oh, it's in the history is it? then I know it must be a 
lie." He would often give the following as " the wise French- 
man's reason : " " Do you say it is impossible ? then I am sure it 
will come to pass." 

One day he said : "Among the gloomy and terrible sights of 
the Secession War were often extremely humorous occurrences. 
It was a sort of rule in many hospitals when certain that a patient 
would die, to give him almost whatever he wanted to eat or 
drink. Under these circumstances some of the men would ask 
for whisky, and drink it freely. One man, a rough Westerner, 
whose life was limited to a few hours, used to wake up in the 
night and call out to the watchman, ' Come, Bill, give me some 
whisky; you know we are going to die. Come, give me some 
whisky, quick !' " 

He had many dry idioms from his old intimacy with omnibus 
drivers in New York and other cities. (He always "took to 
them" and they to him — and the same to this day; at Christ- 
mas, in Washington, Philadelphia, Camden, or where residing at 
the time, he has for years had a custom of dispensing to these 
drivers, on quite a large scale, presents of the strong warm buck- 
skin gloves so serviceable in that occupation.) One little story 
was of an old Broadway driver, who, being interrogated about a 
certain unpopular new-comer, answered with a grin, "Oh, he's 
one o' them pie-eaters from Connecticut." 

Walt Whitman was so invariably courteous and kind in his man- 
ner to every one, it might have been thought he could have easily 
been bored and imposed upon, but this was not at all the case. 
He had so much tact that he always found a way of escape. He 
had a horror of smart talkers, and particularly of being questioned 
or interrogated.- He had a very dry manner of dismissing in- 
truders, or correcting those who went too far — not surly, but a 



His Conversation. 65 

peculiar tone of the voice, and glance of the eye, and sometimes 
a good-natured anecdote. A gentleman said to him one evening 
at tea-time, "I should not think, Mr. Whitman, that you were 
at all an emotional man." "Well," he replied drily, "there is 
*'an old farmer down in Jersey, who says nothing, but keeps up 
"a devil of a thinking; and there are others like him." 

He once told me he had read a good many different translations 
of Homer, and that the one he liked best, after all, was Buckley's 
literal prose version. He did not care for either Lord Derby's 
or Bryant's. I was reading the " Iliad " one day as we sat on 
the veranda together, and I made some remark to the effect that 
it was praised on account of its age and scholarly associations 
rather than its intrinsic merit, and that if it was first published 
now, no one would care anything about it. "Well," he said, 
" perhaps not, but not for the reason you say. See," he said — 
the subject seemed to inspirit him, for he rose and walked slowly 
up and down, leaning on his cane, occasionally pausing — "See 
"how broadly and simply it opens. An old priest comes, op- 
" pressed with grief, to the sea-shore. The beach stretches far 
" away, and the waves roll sounding in. The old man calls his 
"divine master, Apollo, not to permit the foul insults and inju- 
" ries put upon him by the leader of the Greeks. Almost at once 
" in the distance an immense shadowy form, tall as a tree, comes 
"striding over the mountains. On his back he carries his quiver 
" of arrows, and his long silver bow. Just think of it," he said, 
"so daring, so unlike the cultivated prettiness of our poets — so 
"grim, free, large. No, no," he continued, ''don't make light 
" of the ' Iliad.' Think how hard it is for a modern, one of us, 
" to put himself in sympathy with those old Greeks, with their 
"associations." These are the words that he used, but to see 
them in print will convey only a faint impression of their effect, 
or of the man as he said them — the manner, the deep, rich 
melody of the finest voice I believe in the world. 

He thinks much of Dr. John A. Carlyle's translation of Dante's 
" Inferno," has had the volume by him for many years, reads in 
it often, and told me he had learned very much from it, espe- 
cially in conciseness — " no surplus flesh," as he describes it. 

6 



66 Walt Whitman. 

He said very deliberately to me once that he believed he knew 
less, in certain respects, about Leaves of Grass than some of the 
readers of it ; and I believe (strange as it may seem) that this is 
true. There are things in the book I am sure could never be fully 
appreciated from the author's point of view. 

He said one day that he considered the most distinguishing 
feature of his own poetry to be " Its ?nodern?iess — the taking up in 

* their own spirit of all that specially differentiates our era from 
'others, particularly our democratic tendencies." 

Another time he said : " The unspoken meaning of Leaves of 
' Grass, never absent, yet not told out — the indefinable animus 
' behind every page, is a main part of the book. Something 
' entirely outside of literature, as hitherto written ; outside of art 
' in all departments. Takes hold of muscular democratic viril- 
' itieS' without wincing, and puts them in verse. This makes it 

* distasteful to technical critics and readers. I understand all 

* those shrinking objections/' he said, "and consider them in 
' one sense right enough ; but there was something for me to 
'do, no matter how it hurt or offended ; and I have done it." 

He said further: "I don't at all ignore the old stock elements 
' and machinery of poetry, but instead of making them main 
' things, I keep them away in the background, or like the roots 
' of a flower or tree, out of sight. The emotional element, for 
'instance, is not brought to the front, not put in words 
'to any great extent, though it is underneath every page. 
' I have made my poetry out of actual, practical life, such as is 
' common to every man and woman, so that all have an equal 
' share in it. The old poets went on the assumption that there 
' was a selection needed. I make little or no selection, put in 
' common things, tools, trades, all that can happen or belongs to 
' mechanics, farmers, or the practical community. I have not 
' put in the language of politics, but I have put in the spirit ; 
' and in science, by intention at least, the most advanced points 
'are perpetually recognized and allowed for." 

He said to me once, " I often have to be quite vehement with 
'my friends to convince them that I am not (and don't want to 

* be) singular, exceptional, or eminent. I am willing to think 



His Conversation. 6y 

" I represent vast averages, and the generic American masses — 
** that I am their voice ; but not that I should be in any sense 
"considered an exception to ordinary men." 

Another time he said, "I have always considered the writing 
"and publication of Leaves of Grass an experiment. Time only 
"can tell how it will turn out." 

"Remember, the book arose," he said, another time, "out of 
" my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorb- 
"ing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an 
"eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled — land and 
"water. I have told you how I used to spend many half nights 
" with my friends the pilots on the Brooklyn ferry-boats. I some- 
" times took the wheel and steered, until one night a boat I was 
"steering nearly met with a bad accident. After that I would 
"not touch the wheel any more." 

Walt Whitman and Rev. Mr. R. had a long conversation on 
the veranda one beautiful summer evening. Mr. R. wanted to 
get at the sources and birth oi Leaves of Grass from its author. 
The latter spoke as he always does, without any arriere pensee. 
Among other things, he said he had tried to do something that 
would on the one hand give expression to deepest religious 
thought and feeling, and on the other be in accord with the 
last results of modern science. He said, " I do not know that 
"I have succeeded, but at all events I have indicated what needs 
"to be done — and some one else may accomplish the task." 

Another day Mr. R. said, talking of Colonel Robert Ingersoll : 
" He takes away what we have, and gives us nothing in its place 
— is there any good or service in that ?" He pressed Walt Whit- 
man for an answer, to find out his opinion about Ingersoll's argu- 
ment and about Christianity. Walt Whitman said at last: "Well, 
" I think the main and final point about the whole or any of these 
" things is — is it true?" 

He several times spoke of President Lincoln, whom he con- 
sidered the most markedly national. Western, native character 
the United States has yet produced. He never had any par- 
ticular intimacy with Mr. Lincoln, but (being a personal friend 
of John Hay, confidential secretary) saw a good deal of L. — was 



68 ^alt Whitman. 

much at the White House (1863 and '64), and knew the Presi- 
dent's character behind the scenes. In after years he desired to 
keep the anniversary of Mr. Lincoln's death by a public lecture 
he had prepared (see Specimen Days), but he could get neither 
engagements, audiences, nor public interest,* and after delivering 
this lecture in 1879, '80, and '81, to small gatherings, he stopped it. 

He said one Sunday morning after a previous merry evening : 
*' God likes jokes and fun as well as He likes church-going and 
" prayers." Once, after some conversation, he went on to specu- 
late whether Luther was really as original and central a man as 
generally supposed, or whether circumstances ought not to be 
credited with a. good deal that seemed to flow from him — and 
whether his Reformation was of such value to the world as most 
Protestants think. He talked of great men generally, and how 
their apparent greatness is often due to the force of circumstances 
— often because it is convenient for history to use them as radi- 
ating points and illustrations of vast currents of ideas floating 
in the time, more than to any qualities inherent in themselves — 
and ended by discussing Renan's opinion of the relative greatness 
of Jesus, Jesus son of Sirach, and Hillel. 

One evening he said he wondered whether modern poets might 
not best take the same "new departure" that Lord Bacon took 
in science, and emerge directly from Nature and its laws, and 
from things and facts themselves, not from what is said about 
them, or the stereotyped fancies, or abstract ideas of the beauti- 
ful, at second or third removes. 

He once said no one but a medical man could realize the 
appropriateness (jeered at by the "Saturday Review," as proof 
positive that W. W. was no poet,) of his putting in the word 
"diarrhoea" in one of his hospital poems; a malady that stood 
third on the deadly list of camp diseases. In the same connec- 
tion, he said that several pieces in Leaves of Grass could only be 

* In one of the principal cities of the United States, the 15th anniversary of President Lin- 
coln's death (April 15, 1880) was commemorated by this public address. The next morning 
the discriminating editor of the leading daily paper relegates all report of "the Death of 
Abraham Lincoln," as described and commented on by Walt Whitman, to a half-supercilious 
notice of five or six lines — and fills two columns of his journal with a lecture by a visiting 
English clergyman, on " the Evidential Value of the Acts of the Apostles"! 



His Conversation. 69 

thoroughly understood by a physician, the mother of a family of 
children, or a genuine nurse. 

He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of 
men, or time in the world's history, or feudalism, or against any 
trades or occupations — not even against any animals, insects, 
plants, or inanimate things — nor any of the laws of Nature, or 
any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, or 
death. He never complains or grumbles either at the weather, 
pain, illness, or at anything else. He never in conversation, in 
any company, or under any circumstances, uses language that 
could be thought indelicate. (Of course, he has used language 
in his poems which has been thought indelicate, but none that is 
S3.) In fact, I have never known of his uttering a word or a 
sentiment which might not be published without any prejudice 
to his fame. He never swears; he could not very well, since as 
far as I know, he never speaks in anger, and apparently never is 
angry. (I know that he himself will emphatically contradict me 
— that he will refuse to accept this, and a great many more of my 
outlines, as a true portrait of himself, but 1 prefer to draw and 
color for myself.) He never exhibits fear, and I do not believe 
he ever feels it. His conversation, mainly toned low, is always 
agreeable and usually instructive. He never makes compliments 
— very seldom apologizes — uses the common forms of civility, 
such as "if you please," and "thank you," quite sparingly — 
usually makes a nod or a smile answer for them. He was, in 
my experience of him, not given to speculating on abstract 
questions (though I have heard others say that there were no 
subjects in which he so much delighted). He never gossips. 
He seldom talks about private people even to say something 
good of them, except to answer a question or remark, and then 
he always gives what he says a turn favorable to the person 
spoken of. 

His conversation, speaking generally, is of current affairs, 
work of the day, political and historical news, European as well 
as American, a little of books, much of the aspects of Nature, as 
scenery, the stars, birds, flowers, and trees. He reads the news- 
papers regularly (I used to tell him that was the only vice he had) ; 



yo ' Walt Whitman. 

he likes good descriptions and reminiscences. He does not, on 
the whole, talk much anyhow. His manner is invariably calm 
and simple, belongs to itself alone, and could not be fully de- 
scribed or conveyed. As before told, he is fond of singing to 
himself snatches of songs from the operas or oratorios, often a 
simple strain of recitative, a sort of musical murmur, — and he 
sings in that way a large part of the time when he is alone, espe- 
cially when he is outdoors. He spends most of his time out- 
doors when the weather permits, and as a general thing he does 
not stay in for rain or snow, but I think likes them in turn as 
well as the sunshine. He recites poetry often to himself as well as 
to others, and he recites well, very well. He never recites his 
own poetry (he does not seem to know any of it). Yet he some- 
times reads it, when asked by some one he wants to gratify, and 
he reads it well. I do not know whether or not he can be said 
to sing well ; but whether he does or not, his voice is so agree- 
able that it is always a pleasure to hear him. 



APPENDIX 

TO PART I. 



INTRODUCTORY LETTER 

(NOW PREPARED, 1883, FOR THE PRESENT WORK) TO 

THE GOOD GRAY POET (i865-'6), 

BY 

WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. 



(71) 



From a letter to R. M. B.^ by W. F., Mobile, Ala., March, 1883. 
. . . For twenty-seven years have 



A wild and many-weaponed throng 
Hung on the front, and flank, and rear 

of Leaves of Grass, and the author has suffered two special public governmental 
insults for writing them. I hardly see how it could have happened any other 
way. But is it not a luckier fortune than eulogy would have been? It has 
developed in the poet himself an unflinching and sustained courage, fortitude, 
and perseverance without parallel in literature, and which will cast a peculiar 
and permanent glow over all his verse in the future. It has brought to his 
help a small minority of the most devoted and valiant champions that ever 
fought for man or cause. Best of all, it has formed that prefatory foreground 
and area specially needed in such cases, to test and try these most arrogant and 
relentless compositions. For, if Leaves of Grass succeed, they dethrone the 
old sovereigns, the long-settled poetic traditions of Asia and Europe, and com- 
pel Literature, perhaps Sociology and Politics, to a more revolutionary renais- 
sance, a vaster stride, than any in the past. 



(72) 



Mr. O'CONNOR'S LETTER. 1883. 



Washington, D. C, U. S. A., February 22d, 18S3. 

Dr. R. M. Bucke, London, Ontario, Canada. 
Dear Sir : 
It is nearly eighteen years since I published the impassioned protest against 
the mean and monstrous wrong done by the Hon. James Harlan to Walt 
Whitman, which you ask leave to reprint in your Appendix. The warm- 
est friend of that old outburst might think of it as one might of the ring 
of flame he had seen Cotopaxi send with a blast into the tropic azure — a 
burning meteor thrown up to circle and shimmer for a moment in the upper 
air — then vanish. That it is to reappear and remain I shall owe to you. I 
thank you gratefully, but less for the kind personal honor your request does 
me, than for the opportunity you offer to make my otherwise ephemeral work 
a sharer in the enduring life assured to your volume. A pamphlet like mine, 
— crude, extemporaneous, fragmentary, the birth of an exigency, the utterance 
evoked by outrage, the voice of an indignant heart, — is, no matter what its cause 
or purpose, the accident of an hour, and can ordinarily have but the hour's exist- 
ence. This is sternly true of far better compositions of this class than mine. 
Who reads now the masterly " Labienus " of Rogeard ? Who remembers 
those arrows of lightnings, the bright, barbed feuilletons of Paul Louis 
Courier? Even the shafts of the great sagittary, Rochefort, are already 
regathered into the black quiver of yesterday. But a book, with its long fore- 
ground of premeditation, — especially a book with such a subject, such an aim 
as yours, and written from yolir vantage-ground of science, and with your 
ardent intelligence and power, — can lay great bases for eternity. For my 
brochure to be linked to such a one is, therefore, a pledge of its perpetuity, 
and in this I feel cause for satisfaction. Not because of any merit I attach 
to pages of whose faults and deficiencies I am only too well aware, and which 
I wish I had had time and ability to make better, but because those pages hold 
the record of the one action of my life which I could wish might never be 
forgotten, even though it had brought upon me, and was still to bring, every 

7 (73) 



74 Appendix to Part /. 

misrortunc ami every dislionor. Long as I had revered Walt Wliitnian, and 
deeply as I had valued his book, I had never, up to the date of his expulsion from 
office, written a single line in his interest, considering, as I still consider, both 
him and his works subjects far beyond my powers. Even the twelve years 
of shamefid persecution, ostracism, and insult, which followeil llie publication 
of his second edition, the exclusion of any specimen of his poetry from the 
anthologies of American song, the closing of the doors of all periodicals to 
his contributions, the insolent rejections of ids work by the peddlers who call 
themselves publishers, the infamous calumnies invented and set in circulation 
by persons of repute respecting his personal conduct and character, the affec- 
tation of shuddering aversion practised in certain quarters at the sight of his 
face or the mention of his name, the showered misrepresentation and abuse 
of his poems by the reviewers and journalists, — even all this I witnessed and 
endured with as much ccunposure as is compatible with scorn, knowing, in the 
noble words of J'',llcry C'hanning, that "who writes by fate the critics shall 
not kill, nor all the assassins of the great review," certain that, in the trumjiet 
l)lirase of Leibnitz, *' Another time shall come, worthier than ours, in which, 
hatreiis being subdued, truth shall triumph," and that then Walt Whitman 
and his migiity volume would fail not of their meed of veneration. But when 
I saw the poetaster and the plagiary, the hypocrite and the prude, the eunuch 
and till- fop, the poisoner and the blackguard, the snake and the hog, the 
gnat and tin- niidi;r, all the creatures of the marsh and the copse, all the ver- 
min of the kennel and the sewer, every monkey that mops and mows in the 
curule chair of Longinus fancying himself a critic, every chinch that poses 
on the triclinium of Horace imagining himself an author — when 1 saw the 
whole paltry anil venomous swarm condense, as in stune tale of enchantment, 
into a demon in the garb of an in(|uisitor; — when the llarlanunculi became 
resi)lved into the Harlan, and to moral animosity succeeded nuiterial conse- 
quences; — when I saw a man deprived of his employnient, publicly dcgratled, 
and an official stigma set upon his name, simply and only because he had 
once, years before, published an honest book — and noted that among all our 
scholars and literati not one voice — not a single one — was raised even in the 
faintest deprecation ol this dastardly outrage, welcomed insteail with the 
silence that gives consent, and with gibes and gulfaws of approval — then I felt 
that even for a writer so inexperienced ami obscure as I, the hour of <.luty had 
arrived, anil in the pages you reprint I did m) best, as 1 have said in another 
jilace, to secure for the infamy of Mr. Harlan's action undying remembrance. 
It is because I did this — it is because, as Dr. Ji>hnson says, I did what no- 
body else thought worth doing — that I am glad to have the record perpetuated 
in your volume. Let shame or credit follow, I care not which, nor have I 
ever cared. The man who tried to make an author suffer for his book I tried 
to brand ! This is all the claim I make for my pamphlet, anil that panqihlet 
is my act. 1 vaunt it and 1 stand by 



Mr. O Connotes Letter— i^?,t,. 75 

I have spoken, you will remcml)cr, of the hour of Mr. Harlan's explorations 
in the Department, and I rcj^rct now that in the haste of the comiwjsition I 
did not more elaborately ])lace this hour in amlicr. It was not enough that 
he chose to do a mean and monstrous action ; the manner of his doin^ it was 
still meaner and more monstrous. The liook had been for several years out 
of print. It was not in circulation. But in a drawer in the author's desk which 
stood in a room in the lower story of the Department building, there was a 
private copy filled with pencilled interlineations, erasures, annotations — the 
revisions which prepare a text for future publication. This copy was the one 
over which Mr. Harlan pored in the .still hours which followed the closinjj of 
the ofTicial day in the Department. But it was in his own office, in an upper 
story, that he pursued these secret studies. The book was always in its [ilace 
in the author's desk when he went home in the afternoon, and it was always 
there when he returned the next morninfj. It was in the interim that it was 
upstairs. Who was it that cdj^etl ahjuj^ the shadowy passaj^es of the hufje 
buildinjj from the Secretary's apartment — that quietly slipped down the dim 
stairway — that crept, crawled, stole, sneaked into the deserted room of his 
illustrious fellow-officer — that tiptoed up to the vacant desk — that put a fur- 
tive hand into the private drawer and drew out the private volume — that {glided 
back with it to the office of the Secretary ? When the hours of gloating were 
over, and the building was darker and dimmer under its few funereal gaslights, 
turned murkily low, who crept back down the dead-house corridors and stair- 
ways, with a volume in his hand, to the earlier visited aiiarlmcnt, sleallhily 
replaced the volume in the desk, and softly slunk away? Was it Tarluffe 
disguised as Aminidab Sleek, or was it the rampant god I'riapus masquerading 
as Paul Pry? Enough to know that these Department explorations and 
these sub-rosa examinations resulted in Mr. Harlan expelling Walt Whitman 
from his position for having once upon a time published a v(jlume containing 
a little reference to some facts in universal physiology. This reference, it 
seems, shocked the Methodi.st virtue that had endured without flinching the 
daily conversation of Lincoln — Lincoln, under whom Mr. Harlan had ac- 
cepted and held his Secretaryship — a President as soundly good and as 
frankly gross as Luther or Rabelais. 

Mr. Harlan was the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. His 
charge included the public lands and the mines, the interests of the settlers 
and the diggers of ore, the fortune and fate of the red aborigines, the 
awards of the pensions and the tracts given in bounty to the soldiers and 
sailors, the promotion and safeguards of the myriad inventions through the 
issuance of their patents, the mighty task of the census when ordered, tlie 
care of the national insane and deaf and dumb, the supervision of vast terri- 
torial interests ; in brief, an immense part of the ordinance, prosperity and 
development of the country. To execute the public business under his care, 
he had three thousand officers. As Secretary, his conduct of affairs could 



^6 Appendix to Part /. 

enhance the welfare of the nation ; as statesman, his recommendation could 
mould the future. From all this lofty niinistL-rial function, he stooped to the 
meanness and shame of the pick-pry inquisition, and the brutal and insolent 
expulsion described — his victim a poet illustrious in the verdict of the fittest 
of two worlds. 

When I dealt with this abominable action as it deserved — although I no 
more than recognized it in its obvious character as an audacious assault upon 
the liberty of letters, and a flagrant and enormous breach of administrative 
propriety — although I merely flung the light upon it in its avowed intentions 
and proportions, and properly refuted the pretences upon which it claimed to 
be justified, by plainly bringing into opposition the superb purity and grandeur 
of the poem it attacked, as certified by the noblest minds of two continents, 
and the simple and sublime life of the poet it persecuted, as known to many 
of his countrymen — it was of course quite natural and logical that all the 
leading literary and many of the other journals in this country, which for 
years had been devoted to the defamation of which Mr. Harlan's conduct was 
the bright consummate flower, should respond by alleging that I was making 
mountains out of molehills, that my censure and my eulogy were alike inordi- 
nate ; and that they should enter, as they did, into express extenuatioris and 
defences of the Secretary, coupled with their little sneers and scoffs at 
my vindication of the man he had wionged. You can judge of the force 
they brought to their task by the summary I offer of the points made upon 
me by the strongest article of all, the writer in this instance a prosperous and 
eminent man. By this literary magnate I was gravely reminded that Mr. 
Hawthorne lost his place in the Salem Custom House when the Whigs came 
into power, under our precious system of rotation in office, and hence in effect, 
that the Hon. Mr. Harlan's expulsion of Walt Whitman was quite a venial 
and normal act — as like the Whig dismissal of Hawthorne as one pea is like 
another pea. I was coldly informed that the gross wrong inflicted upon Mr. 
Whitman was "the mere loss of an office" — nothing more — nothing what- 
ever ; and I was made to feel that I had the assurance upon the honor of a 
refrigerator. Furthermore, that this " mere loss of an office" furnished no 
proper occasion for such a denunciation of the outrage, and such an apotheosis 
of its object, as were given in my pamphlet. For cool ignoring of all the 
circumstances of the case as set forth in my indictment, and for the simple 
and absolute frigidity of its belittling of Mr. Jiarlan's damnable action, I 
think this article in comparison makes Wrangel Land in the height of the 
Arctic winter an image of all that is bland and warm. Beside it, the icy 
sepulchre itself would seem a summer resort for consumptives. It never 
occurs to the dry light of mind of this just and intelligent critic, taking him 
on his own chosen ground, that there would have been some difference 
between Hawthorne civilly dismissed from office because of a change of ad- 
ministration, and Hawthorne brutally expelled with ignominy, because he had 



Mr, O'Connor's Letter — 1883. 'jy 

celebrated (some think covertly justified), in the sombre and splendid pages 
of the " Scarlet Letter," the adultery of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester 
Prynne. It never occurs to this icily brilliant reviewer that expulsion for 
such a cause would be necessary to establish parity between Hawthorne's 
case and Walt Whitman's — and of course he never so much as glances side- 
long at the consideration of the enormous uproar an expulsion on account of 
the "Scarlet Letter" would have created, though nobody knew this better 
than he. It never dawns for a moment on this prosperous and well-fed 
gentleman that to a poor man, hunted then by our literary ku-klux, almost 
outlawed at that time by the Kemper-county gang who carry out the shot-gun 
policy in our literature and journalism, " the mere loss of an office" might cut 
off the means of subsistence, and be no matter for whiffling away as a mere 
trifle. But why corrtment ? Did he ever really think, or any of his tribe, 
that the expulsion of an author from a public employment on account of his 
book could be made to appear a small matter? While such as I are in the 
world, it can never be a small matter; it will always be a great matter, and 
among the greatest of great matters, in the lasting verdict of every man and 
woman who knows the relation of thought to life, of books to the fortunes of 
mankind. Suppose Chaucer had been ejected from his post of Comptroller 
of Customs under the third Edward, on account of some of that outrageous 
Gallo-Saxon license of conception and expression which so often wantons in 
his pages. Does any one fancy that our scholars and essayists, even at the 
distance of six centuries, would treat the incident coolly, or as of no import- 
ance? Suppose Defoe, on account of the broad pictures in " Moll Flanders," 
or the " Memoirs of a Cavalier," had been deprived of any one of his employ- 
tnents under William or Anne. What sympathy or defence would the minister 
get that did it, from the biographers of the creator of " Robinson Crusoe " ? 
Suppose Charles Lamb had been fired out of his clerkship in the India House, 
because of his defence of the fairy obscenities of Farquhar and Wycherly ? 
Vi'ouldn't there be heat in the blood of London in the Old World, and Boston 
in the New, over the record that such a thing had ever been done to sweet 
old Elia? Suppose Burns had been considered, in the holy name of virtue, 
chastity, decency, Christian civilization, morally unfit to measure Scotch 
malt forever, and turned out of his gaugership because of the ithyphallic 
audacities he showered on the Scotch Harlans in " Holy Willie's Prayer"! 
Wouldn't literature ring with the outrage? Yea, verily; and well do the 
literati know it, who tried to make out that Mr. Harlan's immortal disgrace 
was the merest bagatelle, and mocked at my pamphlet as one of the curiost- 
ties of literature because it denounced his action on the scale of its proper 
magnitude. 

Enough said, both of him and them. "A dog's obeyed in office," but the 
next one the humor of politics dresses up for a Secretary's chair, like Toby in 
a Punch and Judy show, will think seriously before he gives an order for the 



yS Appendix to Part T. 

expulsion of an author on account of the book he had once published. The 
prospect both for Mr. Harlan and his literary apologists grows steadily worse 
as time goes on, and the character and value of Walt Whitman's book become 
established. This is no case of an abuse of power practised upon an author 
of the grade of Chaucer, or Defoe, or Lamb, or Burns. The gross wrong 
done by Mr. Harlan was done to a poet whom all time and every land will 
remember, and the dimensions of the insult and the outrage will be gauged 
by the measure of that universal and eternal fame. Whatever basis the con- 
temptible scribblers of the day gave it, steadily crumbles. It is not in the 
nature of things, it is not in the control of the whole Dunciad, that the vast 
and sane affirmations, the simple and gorgeous beauty, the biblical and demi- 
urgic power of Leaves of Grass, can continue to be themes for the ass reviewer's 
blattering bray. All the literati that ever hee-hawed from the rick in their prior 
existence, before the metempsychosis which placed them in the chairs of criti- 
cism to continue their symphonies, cannot drown the omni-prevalent voice of 
a work of genius. I remember a scene long ago in Faneuil Hall, when an 
attempt was made to silence a matchless orator, the incomparable Wendell 
Phillips, then in the prime of his indescribable forensic powers. He stood 
that evening in the full relief of his severe grace and beauty upon the lighted 
platform of the historic hall — from brow to foot all noble, like those knights 
of Venice Ruskin describes ; the vast floor and galleries before and around 
him densely thronged ; and central in the audience was a mob of stevedores 
and truckmen, the hired Alsatia of that class of merchants whose truckling 
servility to the Slave Power nourished in it the strength for rebellion, and at 
length brought on our Civil War. The moment the orator began, this swarm 
of hirelings became a roaring maelstrom; they whirled around en masse 
without cessation in the middle of the concourse, yelling, howling, shouting, 
without a moment's intermission, and for some time the noise was deafening. 
But, gradually, amidst the tumult there was heard something marvellous. The 
orator had continued speaking with tranquil composure, — with his easy, almost 
careless grace, — with that memorable beauty of tone and demeanor veiling 
earnest feeling, as a Phidian vase might veil the Delphic fire within ; and 
above the hoarse, unintermitted, tremendous uproar of the mob, in its precon- 
certed continuity, was heard his quiet voice ! I never can forget the thrill it 
gave me. Not a word, not an accent was lost. Even the mob heard it, and 
strained their bull-throats to drown it. In vain. Paramount over all the 
clamor, that sweet and penetrating tone was heard, silverly asserting itself in 
even and uninterrupted flow, as clear and alien as the notes of the nightingale 
above the brawl of a flooded gorge ; and it went on until it conquered wholly, 
and in silence, broken only by the sublime roar of acclamations, the splendid 
fountain of that eloquence was streaming upward in full silver flower. So 
dominant above the animal tumult of its defamers, so conquering and to con- 
quer, is the voice of the book we champion. Over the clamor of the whole 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter — 1883. 79 

menagerie it is heard by the minds it has enlightened, the hearts it has com- 
forted, the souls it has deeply stirred, and this voiceless multitude is the van- 
guard of the future. 

Meanwhile the book has achieved the vantage-ground, hardly less valuable 
than its cordial recognition in certain quarters, of having been regularly bid for 
and issued by a business house, instead of being published, as previously, by 
its author only. It is an advance, which should, for the honor of our letters, 
be complemented by a corresponding change in the tone of criticism. But the 
welcome given the reappearance of the work proves, that, even after the lapse 
of twenty years, our reviews are in the same hands — that is to say, paws. The 
criticisms are, to be sure, somewhat improved since the former day when a 
filthy and malignant philistine in the London " Saturday Review " wrote that 
the author deserved to be scourged at the tail of the hangman's cart by the 
public executioner. Whoever seeks the missing link between the libidinous 
swell and the ferocious chimpanzee, might find it in this noble and decent 
criticaster. This amenity of criticism was prompted by the series of poems 
entitled "Children of Adam;" and you know what physiologic dignity, what 
sanctities of purely human love and passion, what savor of natural sanity, 
what wealth of esoteric communication, what rapture of moral elevation, 
wliat adumbrations of holiness, are enshrined within those glorious verses, and 
give them their magnetic scope and fervor. They had the added honor some 
years afterward of causing one of Astor's gentlemen, who sometimes obscurely 
and feebly paddles in Castaly, to style their venerable author with fine scorn, 
" this swan of the sewers." I could retort upon Dr. Macnobody that he is a 
buzzard of the club-house kitchen, but this might be thought personal. Of- 
the more recent notices it may be remarked that they are generally less poign- 
ant and more dull than their old prototypes. Some of them, as in the 
'• Atlantic Monthly," show instinctively cordial perceptions quenched in abject 
cowardice. The review in the New York "Times," marked by great talent, 
is a singular example of stultification, the writer diplomatically annulling in 
one passage what he has just said in another, this process being pursued 
throughout with a mechanical uniformity which is simply comical. The one 
in the " Nation" is in artistic keeping with the tone of that chilly journal, and 
is otherwise only noticeable for its cold and brutal falsehoods. One of its in- 
dictments appears again in an article in " The Woman's Journal," signed with 
the initials of the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The exceeding value 
of this accusation warrants its reproduction, and also its rescue from the ob- 
livion of the anonymous. What, think you, is this weighty finding? .Actually, 
now — really, now — Mr. Higginson avers that Walt Whitman ought to become 
the focal point of million-fingered scorn for having served in the hospitals ! It 
appears that the old poet performed a pathetic, a suljlime, an immortal service 
— he tended the wounded and dying soldiers throughout the whole war, and 
for years afterward, until the last hospital disappeared. O, but tliis was in- 



8o Appendix to Part I. 

famous ! Shame on such " unmanly manhood," yells the Rev. Mr. Higginson ! 
He should have personally " followed the drum," declares this soldier of the 
army of the Lord, himself a volunteer colonel. In bald words, instead of 
volunteering for the ghastly, the mournful, the perilous labors of those swarm- 
ing infernos, the hospitals, Walt Whitman should have enlisted in the rank 
and file. From all which, I gather that Mr. Higginson would have cast a 
stone at Jean Valjean for going down without a musket into the barri- 
cades. I beg leave to tell this reverend militaire that if Longfellow had gone 
from Cambridge to serve in the hospitals, as Walt Whitman served, the land 
would have rung from end to end, and there would have been no objurgations 
on his not enlisting in the army, from the pen of the Rev. Thomas Wentworth 
Higginson. I also beg leave to tell him, since he brings personalities into 
fashion, that Walt Whitman's work of comfort and charity beside the cots of 
the Union and rebel soldiers, will last as long, and stand as fair, as the mili- 
tary bungling and blundering which distinguished this clergyman turned 
colonel, and evoked such agonized curses from his commanding officer at 
Port Royal. Better be a good nurse like Walt Whitman, than a nondescript 
warrior like the Rev. Col. Higginson. 

The remainder of his article is quite taken up with an attack upon a few 
erotic verses in Oscar Wilde's poems, about which Mr. Higginson, as badly read 
as badly bred, says there is " nothing Greek," because they do not " suggest the 
sacred whiteness of an antique statue," although, as Mr. Higginson ought to 
know, there is a mass of literature, ranging from Aristophanes, Anacreon, Sap- 
pho, Longus, etc., to such as Mimnermus and Alcman, which they do suggest, 
and which Mr. Higginson could hardly describe as having "nothing Greek," 
but which could give Mr. Wilde a good many points in erotic composition, if 
that has anything to do with making him Hellenic. On the strength of these 
poetic audacities of Mr. Wilde, the Rev. Mr. Higginson lumps him in with Walt 
Whitman for reprobation, holding them both up in contrast with Sir Philip 
Sidney, whom he appears to consider the proper model of a poet, and calls 
(quoting Fulke Greville, I suppose), " a brave example of virtue and religion." 
I read this effusion with infinite amusement. Is it credible that the Rev. Mr. 
Higginson has never seen the " Astrophel and Stella" of that very Sir Philip 
Sidney he vaunts so roundly ? He puts on the face of Nightgall the jailor, 
Sorrocold the torturer, Mauger the headsman, Mawworm the gospeller, and 
Moddles the weeper, all in one — he is dark, cruel, implacable, denunciatory, 
and disconsolate, all together — over the terrible fact that " the poems of 
Wilde and Whitman lie in ladies' boudoirs." Does he think that the "Astro- 
phel and Stella" of Sir Philip Sidney is the sort of poem that ought prefer- 
ably to " lie in ladies' boudoirs " ? This work, a galaxy of songs and sonnets, 
some of them exquisite, was inspired, be it remembered, by a married M'oman, 
Lady Rich, who figures in it as Stella, and is addressed by Sidney as Astro- 
phel. The husband, Lord Rich, is repeatedly mentioned in terms of the ut- 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter— \%%i. 8 1 

most contumely and insult. In one of the songs (the second) the fourth stanza 
of which is specially lascivious, the poet limns in glowing terms the lovely 
wife sleeping, steals a voluptuous kiss, and blames himself for not having taken 
the extremest advantage of her slumber! In another song (the fourth) there 
is protracted and vehement amorous solicitation for her person to be yielded 
to him, ending with a strain of whimpering dejection because of her refusal! 
The eighth song is in a similar style. In the fifty-second sonnet he fables a 
contest between Virtue and Love for the possession of Stella, which he pro- 
poses to settle by letting Virtue have the lady on the condition that her volup- 
tuous body be yielded to Love and him ! In the tenth song his thought 
dwells in gloating anticipation of carnal enjoyment with her, and runs and 
revels in a rosy riot of amorous images, prolonged through half a hundred 
lines ! These are specimens of the staple of the poetry this virtuous clergyman 
would seem to choose for the accompaniment of ladies' boudoirs ! Ah, Mr. 
Higginson ! it will take the effacing memories of Zutphen — it will take some 
of the immortal water the dying Sidney yielded from his flask to the parched 
lips of the wounded soldier, to wash away, for some of us, from the fame of 
one of the last of England's chevaliers, the stain of these disgraceful poems — 
poems which dishonor the wife while they insult the husband, and whose 
author is nevertheless your chosen exemplar of manly excellence — brought 
forward to shame by contrast Oscar Wilde for the sin of publishing a few 
verses far less bold than the verses of the Rev. Dr. Donne, or the " Venus and 
Adonis " of Shakespeare — brought forward also to darken Walt Whitman be- 
cause in a few of his lines he has celebrated with grave simplicity the noble 
amative impulse gi^eat Nature feels forever through all her immensity ! So 
much for the criticism wherewith the Rev. Mr. Higginson decorates " The 
Woman's Journal." 

As for the review in the " New York Tribune," it would seem to have 
been written, as Sir Walter Scott says " Amadis de Gaul" was written, 
in a brothel. The writer leads off by saying that the poems have " been read 
behind the door; " that " they have been vaunted extravagantly by a band of 
extravagant disciples, and the possessors of the books have kept them locked 
up from the family ; " which makes you think that the critic is simply, as the 
Hon. Thomas H. Benton called Pettee, "a great liar and a dirty dog," until, 
reading further, you find him declaring that the book, which he has already 
elegantly called "the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman," has for a principle "a 
belief in the preciousness of filth," is " entirely bestial," full of " nastiness and 
animal insensibility to shame," and that the chief question it raises "is 
whether anybody, even a poet, ought to take off his trousers in the market- 
place ; " which makes you at once set down the reviewer as indubitably, in 
the phrase of the moralist Hawkesworth, " a lewd young fellow," and " a 
great liar and a dirty dog" besides. The whole article is thoroughly obscene. 
It is characterized throughout by what might be called the indecent exposure 



82 Appendix to Part I. 

of the mind, and is a disgrace to even its author and to the journal in which it 
appears. 

Better and worse than the stuff these scurrilous dreams are made of is an 
article by Mr. Clarence Cook, in the " International Review," which I have 
read with mingled feelings of regret and indignation. It is almost incredible 
to find this gentleman, who ought by his intellectual connections to be better 
informed, and who should have education enough to know the truth without 
information, asserting and assuming through his whole essay that Leaves of 
Grass is a derivation from the writings of Emerson. He says that the prose 
preface to the original edition of the poem shows " where the author came from 
intellectually ;" that " Mr. Whitman had been for a long time milking the New 
England transcendentalists," and that " most of it is an echo of Emerson him- 
self, minus his music and his wit." Furthermore, that Walt Whitman in his 
poetry " does nothing more than enlarge and exaggerate the 'Nature ' and the 
first volume of ' Essays,' of his master." It was long ago published authenti- 
cally in Mr. Conway's widely copied and circulated article, what is the fact, 
that Walt Whitman had never read Emerson at all until after the publication 
of his first edition ; and he was quite as mnocent of any knowledge of the 
papers in the " Dial," despite the preface which Mr. Cook fancies an echo of 
Emerson and Concord. But he had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte.and Hegel, 
as Mr. Cook, if he had taken the trouble to read the book he was reviewing, 
could have seen plainly, and the thought of that giant quaternion, which, in 
fact, is rather an expression of what is in the minds of all men in our age, than any- 
thing that ha-; been communicated to them by the four philosophers, is precisely 
the thought of which Mr. Emerson, in this country, like Cousin in France, is, in 
his writings, without any derogation to his own proper originality, the carrier 
or interpreter; so that all the indebtedness Mr. Cook oracularly fancies, is 
referable to the German source both minds had drunk from, though in Walt 
Whitman's case it is easy to see that his own powerful and sensitive genius, 
naturally in rapport with the thought of his age, far better accounts for the 
ideas of his book than any acquaintance with the well-heads of modern phi- 
losophy. This ridiculous notion of Leaves of Grass as a sort of rowdy ampli- 
fication of Emerson, began twenty years ago with some amusing persiflage in 
" Putnam's Magazine " — the harmless fancy of my old friend Mr. George 
William Curtis, who sometimes softly, sweetly, slips into ad captandums with 
irresponsible indolent grace. It was taken up again, and enforced, not at all 
harmlessly, but with malicious iteration, by Mr. Bayard Taylor, in a seriesof gra- 
tuitous and inappropriate editorials, published seven years ago in the " New 
York Tribune," with the object of breaking down a certain movement in behalf 
of Mr. Whitman, and it gave me then, in conjunction with some of his other 
representations, a new idea of what might be meant by the old saying that " a 
tailor is the ninth part of a man." Now it comes up again, with the perti- 
nacity of wood-wax or the Canada thistle, among a lot of similar superstitions. 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter— iSS$. 83 

in this " International Review " article, making me think of the Spanish 
proverb, " God sends meat, but the devil sends cooks." The meat is Leaves 
of Grass, and the esthetic Clarence being cuisinier, a nice dish he makes of 
it, with his bogus recipes ! Did it ever occur to any of these gentlemen who 
derive Walt Whitman's thought from Emerson's, to compare the two in their 
palpable and tremendous dissimilarities ? Where, for one instance out of a 
hundred, is the pantheistic doctrine in the Z^aw^j, which is the constant asser- 
tion and implication in the Essays ? Where, for another instance, do you find 
in Emerson the haughty and rejoicing faith in the immortality of the personal 
soul, which peals from end to end of Leaves of Grass like the trumpet of the 
resurrection ? It would be well for Mr. Clarence Cook's reputation as a 
critic, if the utter sciolism his dealing with this branch of his subject betrays, 
had no worse concomitants. But he goes on, and dropping into apologies in 
a friendly way, he slips in as their basis a string of defamations regarding the 
noble frankness of those passages of the book in which Emerson found " the 
courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only 
can inspire." In the face of this imprimatur he has the Himalayan effrontery 
to represent that Emerson was originally "in the marble purity of his mind" 
very much shocked at these passages. "At first," says Mr. Cook, "he could 
not see the wood-god for his phallus." I beg to compliment Mr. Cook on the 
marble purity of this image, which does not, however, precisely remind one 
of the marble faun, nor of the good satyr the poet heard playing his flute in 
the heart of the twilight on Mount Janiculum. 

But Mr. Cook's metaphors concern me less than his calumnies, and I would 
really like to know what evidence he has that Emerson was ever, first or last, 
shocked at Walt Whitman's volume. For in proof of his bold assertion he 
advances not one word. " Later," he continues, " Emerson wrote a letter to 
Whitman, in which he said, ' I greet you at the beginning of a great career ' — " 
and the ice being thin here, he deftly skates away into an old worn-out imper- 
tinence about Mr. Whitman's "breach of confidence," as he calls it, in print- 
ing this sentence from a communication not confidential " in letters of gold on 
the back of a new edition of his book," as it certainly deserved to be printed, 
and as Mr. Whitman had an unquestionable right to print it. But this letter 
of Emerson's in which he expressed his cool, deliberate judgment of Leaves 
of Grass, and told precisely how it affected him, what was it, and why did he 
not bring it forward ? Here it is, and I invite you and your readers to decide 
whether it bears out, by any exjDression or implication, Mr. Clarence Cook's 
misrepresentations : 

" I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I 
" find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet 
" contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. 
" It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and 



84 Appendix to Part I. 

" stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the tem- 
"perament, were making our Western wits fat and mean. 

" I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. 
" I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find 
" the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception 
" only can inspire. 

" I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had 
'' a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little 
"to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a 
" sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encour- 
" aging." 

This was Mr. Emerson's judgment on Leaves of Grass, and never, to his 
undying honor, did he retract it. I call your attention to its scope, its abso- 
lute comprehensiveness. If there was anything in the book of which he dis- 
approved he had the plain opportunity to say so, and it was his imperative 
duty to say so. On the contrary, he gives the poem — he gives the very edition 
of it Mr. Cook says had shocked him — the most unreserved, the most unqual- 
ified, the most unbounded approval. He calls it the most extraordinary piece 
of intellect and wisdom America has yet contributed; he congratulates the 
author on the liberty and valor of his thought ; and he finds especial delight 
in the courage of treatment which marks the whole performance, and which, he 
says, and Walt Whitman's critics would do well to remember, large perception 
only can inspire. This is the proof Mr. Cook shies from supplying, of the 
way Leaves of Grass " shocked " Mr. Emerson ! He has no other, for the 
sentence he ascribes to Mr. Emerson as his judgment upon the book or its 
author — " Strange that a man with the brain of a god should have a snout 
like a hog " — was never uttered by Emerson at all. In a matter of this im- 
portance I insist upon the purity of the text, and Mr. Cook has reported this 
flashing moment of the wise wrong. The mot as it was really uttered ran 
thus, " Strange that a man should have the brain of a god and the snout of 
a hog," and in this shape it was said of Walt Whitman by Mr. E. P.Whipple 
in 1855 or thereabouts, and reported to me, with great glee, fresh from his 
lips, by one of his dear friends, who afterwards ran away with the trust funds 
and beggared the widow and the orphan — a natural consequence of his delight 
in such sarcasms. The habit of murder, De Quincey warns us, inevitably 
leads to procrastination and Sabbath-breaking, and a man who admires Mr. 
Whipple's wit may be expected, sooner or later, to make off with the cash of 
the community. I will only remark upon this particular jeti d'' esprit that in 
its vitreous brilliancy, and the perfect moral absurdity of its antithesis, to say 
nothing of the falsehood of its application, it is entirely worthy of its true 
author, and I leave Mr. Cook to its continued enjoyment. But I assure him 
that his success in the correct ascription of epigram is not such as to inspire 
me with an unfaltering trust that Wendell Phillips iTttered the pleasantry he 



Mr. O Connor's Letter— id,^T,. 85 

attributes in turn to him. When I gratefully remember that Mr. Phillips 
wrote me that he placed Walt Whitman's " Democratic Vistas " in equal 
honor on the same shelf with his beloved Tocqueville, and when I recall with 
equal gratitude the glowing and ample welcome he gave my pamphlet defence 
of the slandered poet, I have little reason to assume on Mr. Cook's authority 
that that clear and generous voice expressed even the light disparagement the 
reviewer puts into currency. Still, Mr. Cook may claim something from my 
bounty, and I will give him this as a donation. Let me suppose that Mr. 
Phillips, in his own enchanting fashion, really did say of Leaves of G7-ass, as 
our gossip reports him — " here be all sorts of leaves except fig leaves" — but 
added with a graver modulation, " including those of the Tree of Life, whose 
leaves are for the healing of the nations"! That this is the true version, 
though a guess, I will venture my last obolus, and go in debt to Charon ! 

Of Mr. Cook's remaining "International" excursions in criticism, it is not 
necessary to say anything. When he declares the poem destitute of beauty 
and proportion, and absolutely wanting in art, I might remind him that Rus- 
kin, who is a tolerable authority in these respects, having forgotten consider- 
ably more of aesthetic law than Mr. Cook ever knew, has recently, if the 
public journals say truly, uttered a eulogium upon Leaves of Grass, which 
hardly sustains this weighty dictum. When he charges as the " worst fault of 
all " in the book " its absolute want of humor," I might venture to suggest 
that, although the rich mirthful temperament of the author, which all who 
know him know well, is evident enough in the opulent cheerfulness and the 
mellow tone of his work. Leaves of Grass is not, as Mr. Cook appears to fancy, 
an attempt at comedy, nor can it be considered the " worst fault of all " that 
we do not split our sides wiih laughter over the book of Isaiah. When he 
pronounces the work utterly " without taste," I could retort upon him that 
there are only ten baskets of taste let down from heaven for each generation, 
and he and nimble men like him have always got them all, which is probably 
the reason why none of the great geniuses in poetry ever had any, from Aris- 
tophanes to Moliere, or from y^schylus to Victor Hugo. But there is only one 
point upon which I care to offer a serious comment. In speaking of the first 
issue of Leaves of Grass, Mr. Cook says that in it was expressed " scorn of 
the conventions of society by one who never knew them, and was as ignorant 
of society as a Digger Indian." When I came upon this stroke of ignorant 
insolence I felt my blood stir, and Mr. Cook owes it to my forbearance if I 
do not make him feel what resources the English language has for the chas- 
iscinent of offences of this description. What does he mean by publishing 
as a secies of Yahoo a man who all his life has been the honor and ornament 
of society as good as Mr. Cook ever entered ? whose high spiritual cultivation 
is as apparent in his personal manners as in his poetry ; and who never, even 
in thought, could be guilty of such insufferable low-breeding as this sentence 
of his critic displays ? I remember, years ago, the eminent son of the most 



86 Appendix to Part I. 

eminent man in New England, at the very top of the highest and most exclu- 
sive Boston society, coming from his first interview with Walt Whitman, 
whom he had met with distrust and prejudice, and all we could get from him 
as to what had passed was the abstracted, iterated rejoinder, the expression of 
his prevailing impression — " He is a perfect gentleman." In his young man- 
hood Walt Whitman was an intimate friend of Bryant, his companion in 
many long country rambles. He was a welcome guest, when I first knew 
him, at some of the best and wealthiest houses in New York. It was the 
same when he was with us here. It was the same when he was with me once 
in Providence. It was the same during his recent visit to Boston. It was 
the same when he was with you in Canada. Yet Mr. Cook prates of his 
ignorance of society and its conventions, and matches him, in reference, with 
the very lowest western savage. I used to think Mr. Clarence Cook, when I 
slightly knew him many years ago, a gentleman, although a somewhat super- 
fine one, but one would think he desired to forfeit all claim to such consider- 
ation. He says, in the latter part of his article, that for much that Walt Whit- 
man has written it would not be easy to repay him with grateful words. It is 
a sorry way to show gratitude, this reproduction of stale and shallow fig- 
ments, most of them denied and refuted time and again ; and this utterance 
of as brutal a personal insult, couched in utter falsehood, as one man could 
well offer to another. 

Such, up to this date, is the best specimen we can offer in America of a 
review of Leaves of Grass in its new edition. Let me show you, in this connec- 
tion, the kind of knave a literary editor can be. The New York " Tribune" 
reprinted this article of Clarence Cook's, in which, it is just to Mr. Cook to 
say, he had imbedded several paragraphs favorable in some degree to the 
work and its author; one praising its original typographical appearance, the 
poet's own get-up; another eulogizing some of the poems by name ; and nota- 
bly another, from which I give the following sentences : " It would be a 
" thousand pities were the author judged by the few passages, perhaps not two 
" pages in all, where his frankness pushes him to say things that are only 
" coarse because they are said. Of indecency, of essential grossness, there is 
" in the book really nothing. It is easy to believe the author as pure-minded, 
" as incapable of doing or thinking evil, as any best man among us who vi'ould 
" blush to be seen in his shirt-sleeves by a woman." These favorable para- 
graphs, the one quoted from being in direct opposition to the obscene review 
previously published in the " Tribune," its literary editor suppressed in repro- 
ducing the article, sending it out thus shorn to a million of readers. The 
animus is evident. Such is the treatment received by the grandest book of 
poetry uttered in the English tongue for over two centuries. And it is grand ! 
Well might Emerson greet its author at the beginning of a great career ! 
Nothing equal to it has appeared in Celto-Saxon literature since Shakespeare. 

I mean what I say, and I have considered my words. It is the first poetic 



Mr. G Connor's Letter— iZ^t,. 8/ 

work in the English language since Shakespeare — let them deny it who dare 
— that sounds the trumpet for a new advance ; that is not merely original but 
aboriginal ; that pours forth the afflatus for another movement ; that is in its 
theory and purpose a new departure. " Solitary, singing in the West," the 
poet himself says, " I strike up for a New World." 

Consider the cardinal poets since the age of Elizabeth. We all know the 
absolute high level, below that Elizabethan mountain range, constituted by 
Milton. Great and noble as he is, he is not even the poet of that Puritanism 
whose harsh spell left him, like the prince in the Arabian story, half breathing 
flesh and half marble. The lofty mood of Ann Hutchinson and Sir Harry 
Vane is not expressed in his poetry. What is Pope ? The philosophy of 
Bolingbroke felicitously arrayed in facile iambics — a theism fit, as Heine says, 
to be the religion of watch-makers ; a popular paraphrase, almost a court dis- 
guise, of Homer; some splendid intercolumniations of polished urban satire; 
these are his masterpieces. What is Dryden ? A masterly satiric talent with- 
out a conscience. What is Walter Scott ? In his verse, only a superb story- 
teller. In Wordsworth we have a strong but circumscribed intelligence. 
Once only, in his noble ode upon Immortality, he rose and broadened into 
the serene region of the great ideas. Below that, he is great only in a true 
perception of some common things — a stalk of celandine, a village rustic, a 
mountain cloud. But his kosmos is Westmoreland, and he is radically the 
centaur of the parson. In Burns there are true songs, wild gleams, immortal 
pulses, arrested by an early death. In Keats death also soon stopped that 
copious rich flowering into English verse of the Greek rose and asphodel. 
What leader of the nations might not the all-noble Byron have become, had 
he but lived to make ripe the continental promise which appears in the broad 
European picturings, the magnanimous intellections, the clarion blasts of 
rebellion, that fill " Childe Harold"; which appear still clearer in "Don 
Juan," whose fearless stripping of the veil from the monstrous hypocrisy of 
society, whose aggrandizement of humanity and liberty, and whose mines of 
liberal and revolutionary epigram, give it the rank of one of the greatest 
poems ever inspired by the pure moral sentiment ! And Shelley — had he but 
grown to maturity, and gathered force and become intimate with rude life, 
what fire upon the altar of what gods would not have been pale beside that 
which sparkles in the ashes of his lines ! If Tennyson had continued as he 
began, the loyal outgrowth of Shelley and Byron, the developed poet of 
"Maud," of "Clara Vere de Vere," of " Ulysses " and " Locksley Hall " 
.... but he soon learned that kind hearts are less than coronets, and simple 
faith than Norman blood ; — he shrank back into aristocracy ; — and now at the 
last analysis, what is he? An ethereal delight of poesy; no less; no more. 
I speak only of Celto-Saxon poetry, not of the mighty births of the French 
romantic movement. In my own country, in the United States, that poetry, 
aside from Leaves of Grass, has not appeared in a single racy specimen. The 



88 Appendix to Part I. 

only possible exception, though in a minor key, is the weird and lovely lyric verse 
of Edgar Poe, perfectly distinctive, shrining a strange mythology of personal 
love and sorrow, and having its roots in certain parts of our southern life. 
But poetry such as his only influences, it does not emancipate or lead. Not one 
of our poets has had broad or deep aims. Longfellow, with exquisite liter- 
ary grace and human benignity, yields only centos and distillations. Whittier 
makes local ballads. Emerson has produced a handful of mystic jewels, rose 
diamonds and white, a virtuoso's joy, like the gems of Andrew Marvell or 
Vaughan. Bryant's fame rests on " Thanatopsis," a thing of faithless beauty, 
though a joy forever, but which internal evidence shows stolen, and which 
might have been written in Sherwood Forest, or by Omar Khayyam, so little 
does it smack of any particular soil. In fine, the last supreme performance 
in poetry, before any of the poets I have named, was Elizabethan. The last 
full signal for a great march — for an exodus out of old conventions, old dog- 
mas, old ideas, old theories, was Shakespeare. 

What is Shakespeare's new departure? It is this : He is the first poet that 
ever devoted the drama to the physiology of the human passions — the chief 
problem. Bacon says, of moral philosophy; the knowledge that philosopher 
proclaimed wanting in the antique past ; the condition indispensable, he de- 
clares, to the human advancement. That initial body of natural history de- 
manded by Bacon has been supplied by Shakespeare, in the interest of the 
human race. This is his cardinal distinction as a poet ; this makes his great- 
ness and his glory. 

An old and valued friend of mine, whose opinions are entitled to deep 
respect, has lately said that the Greek dramatists, especially .^^schylus, excel 
Shakespeare in their treatment of the passions. I am sorry not to be able to 
think this true. Indeed, it seems to me it would be far nearer the truth to 
say that the Greek dramatists, in their colossal spectacular operas, never treated 
the passions at all. Much wisdom, much deep lore, much lofty morality, 
much fearful history, much dread theology, and questioning of that theol- 
ogy, expressed in tremendous passionate situation, these tragedies have in- 
deed, but this is their whole staple. No one can better feel its majesty than 
I, nor can any one more than I appreciate the sublimity of the appalling 
thunder-crash of fatal circumstance which bursts forth in pealing reverbera- 
tions against that drama's religious and legendary depth of gloom, or the stu- 
pendous power of what must have been its lovely and mournful groupings, its 
horrible and magnificent denouements, its strange and supra-mortal living 
tableaux, as of gigantic animated sculpture, moving to breath-suspending 
music. But I affirm that never in a single instance did the Greek poets devote 
their tragedies to the exhibition of the passions in their evolution — in their 
circumstantial development from grade to grade of action — such as we see in 
" Hamlet," in " Othello," in " Tear." Indeed, the very conditions of their 
drama precluded such an exhibition. The theatre of Athens was built to ac- 



Mr. O Connor's Letter — 1883. 89 

commodate thirty thousand spectators. To such a concourse the tragedy of 
" Macbeth," even with Kemble and Siddons in the chief parts, would have 
seemed a play of dwarfs — the tragic expression unseen, the gestures those of 
puppets, the voices almost lost, the sense incoherent, in the vastness of that 
stage and auditorium. In such a space nothing but a form of drama, of the 
nature of a spectacular opera, conceived in a gigantic mould, and suggesting 
the superhuman, would have been possible. Instead of the subtle passional 
metaphysics which Shakespeare, availing himself of the limits of the modern 
stage, can make dramatically evident — better still, can make by language 
alone even more evident to the solitary student of his pages — the Greek 
dramatist had to substitute such conceptions, ideas, conclusions, as might be 
broadly expressed in imposing stage effects, with adjuncts of scenic action 
and music. Hence actions rather than passions; hence a succession of tab- 
leaux ; a tremendous, significant, sombre, sounding show. Hence upon the 
vast Athenian stage only two interlocutors at a time upon the scene, besides 
the choruses — .^Eschylus bayed at as an audacious innovator for introducing 
three ; the stature of these actors raised to a supra-mortal height by the 
cothurnus; their size increased by voluminous draperies; their faces dis- 
charged of all but the one expression, by the awful and petrific mask ; their 
voices augmented to thunderous or silver-shrilling tones by the brazen trumpet 
of the mouth-piece; and the verses of the tragedy intoned and sung by the 
duo or trio of histrions, or by the pealing voices of the choirs, ranged in dra- 
matic sympathy with their action. In fact, if we can imagine an appalling 
and mysterious legend played by titanic statues of dreadful bronze and 
marble against a scene of eld, those statues become animate and vocal and 
resembling little that is human, we can gain some idea of the impression of a 
Greek tragedy. Something of its fearful and beauteous weirdness is sug- 
gested by that eerie line of Cowper, where, musing in his garden, he sees " a 
statue walk." Except to the evocation of the soul this form of supreme art 
is forever gone ; the superb, the terrible, the enchanting spectacle, the astound- 
ing accumulation of catastrophes, the piled-up agonies, the marble loveli- 
ness, the celestial pathos, the horrent grandeurs, the Corybantic dances, the 
Eolian music, once ocular and auricular to the Greek audience, and surcharged 
with meaning not of this world, made evident through the senses to the souls 
of the auditors — all this can only be dimly recovered by the imagination ; 
and of the august Greek tragedies (such as remain to us) we have nothing but 
the meagre and almost unintelligible librettos, no more to us than the librettos 
of great modern operas, except — a formidable exception indeed — that, unlike 
the librettos of "William Tell," of "Don Giovanni," of "II Puritani," or 
the rest, they were written by mighty poets and in the pentecostal language 
of poetry. Still, they are but librettos, the broken fiery lines of a dying fire- 
work of Promethean fire, the caput mortiiuni, the mere skeleton, the vacant 
framework of what was once in its enacting an orbicular and living drama. 



90 Appendix to Part I. 

vital, glowing, sublime and enormous, the work of men like gods. As 
librettos — mere outlines which the representations are needed to complete — 
they cannot fairly be brought into comparison with the text of Shakespeare, a 
text as full to the reader as to the play-goer — fuller, indeed, so long as 
Shakespeare can be butchered to make a schoolboy's holiday by the gang of 
Barnums who run the modern stage, and mangle his dramas, and disembowel 
his meaning, with that brutish indifference to art and truth and human pro- 
gress, which is fed by sole regard for fat receipts at the ticket-office. But, 
completed by the exercise of the conceptive power, the dry though mighty 
bones of these librettos, again clothed with their terrible and magnificent life, 
the Greek drama (although ylischylus has unquestionable features of resem- 
blance) differs radically in form and motive from the drama of Shakespeare, 
and is intrinsically removed from comparison. I think Aristotle gives the 
full account of it when he says that its object was to move the soul with pity 
and terror; and the criticism that has been justly given in censure upon 
Aristotle as a philosopher in regard to his treatment of the human passions, 
namely, that he only considers the rhetorical or artificial means whereby they 
may be excited, and neglects to compile thc'r natural history, may be made in 
no spirit of censure, but in simple descriptiveness, in regard to the Greek 
tragedies, inasmuch as their authors only regarded in their composition the 
means of exciting the passions of those who were to behold them played, and 
attempted in the works themselves no analysis or synthesis of any of the pas- 
sions — not one. This undertaking was reserved for Shakespeare, and I affirm 
that the entire novelty of the conception and the scientific accuracy and mas- 
sive comprehensiveness, as well as the supreme power and beauty of its exe- 
cution, constitute his special and distinctive greatness as a poet. The main 
scope and purpose of the Shakespeare drama are definitely given by Lord 
Bacon in connection with his assertion that the compilation of the natural 
history of the human passions is the first duty of philosophy, and that it is 
particularly the province of poetry. In this connection he describes the 
Shakespearean work perfectly. Therein, he says, " we may find painted forth 
"with great life how passions are kindled and incited; how pacified and 
" refrained ; and how again contained from act and further degree ; how they 
" disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary; how they gather and 
"fortify; how they are inwrapped one within another; and how they do 
"fight and encounter one with another; and other the like particulars." 
" That is to say," remarks Dr. Kuno Fischer, quoting this passage : " Bacon 
" desires nothing less than a natural history of the passions; the very thing 
" that Shakespeare has produced. Is not," he says further, " the inexhaustible 
" theme of Shakespeare's poetry the history and course of human passion ? 
" In the treatment of this special theme, is not Shakespeare the greatest of 
" all poets, nay, is he not unique among them all ?" Strange, I must remark, 
in passing, that the illustrious Kantian (and the observation applies to Gervi- 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter — 1883. 9 1 

nus as well) should have gone so far in this matter, and not taken the step 
that would seem inevitable ! But the fact remains, admitted on all sides, its 
significance only remaining unperceived — Shakespeare is the poet of that par- 
ticular knowledge of human nature which Bacon declares necessary " in order 
" that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind may be 
"rightly concluded upon;" and no matter what the myriad-figured, many- 
millioned play of the imagination which attends his work — no matter how 
profuse and rich the pageant, wherein kings, lords, prelates, gentlemen, 
clowns, fairies, ghosts, trades, employments, wars, elements, cities, landscapes, 
antique and modern shows, appear in uni multiplex projection, and form in 
ensemble the immense profile of Europe from the view-point of the Eliza- 
bethan age — no matter how ample the pour of learning, wisdom, apothegm, 
axiom, wit, humor, literary felicity, dazzling metaphor, noble imagery, classic 
allusion, every verbal grace and grandeur, as from a cornucopia heaped with 
constellations — no matter how deep the summer of his verse, the purpose to 
present the physiology of the human passions runs through it all ; and his 
drama stands the perfect suppliance of an immense defect in ancient philoso- 
phy, and the foremost division of that scientific movement of his time for the 
relief of the human estate, the extension of the empire of man over Nature, 
the transformation of the world into Paradise, which still continues, and which 
we call Baconian. His main purpose does not, of course, prevent the inclu- 
sion of collateral purposes, only less vast — parables of a new philosophy, as 
in the "Tempest" and the "Midsummer Night's Dream;" special solutions 
of political problems, as in " Coriolanus " and " Julius Caesar;" in one in- 
stance a complete epic of the Wars of the Roses — the series of historical 
plays which Bacon calls "history made visible." But the main purpose 
remains other than the special purposes of these. 

To the historical plays, with their high-stomached lords, their dragon 
rancors, their stormy feudal splendor, I think Walt Whitman gives undue 
weight in his estimate of Shakespeare's world. He seems to derive from them 
his powerful generalization of Shakespeare as the poet of Feudalism. This 
would be true of Walter Scott, a man sounder and healthier in his moral 
nature than in his intellect, and who saw the horrible grandeur of the feudal 
past through a glamour of beauty : it would be measurably true of Tennyson ; 
I doubt if it is true of Shakespeare. Certainly " King John," " Richard the 
Second," " Richard the Third" and the rest, do not affect the mind with the 
winsome charm of " Ivanhoe" or " The Talisman." Their atmosphere is one 
of barbarous and tumultuous gloom, and they do not make us love the times 
they limn. They seem simply and rudely historical in their motive, as aim- 
ing to give in the rough a tableau of warring dynasties, and carry to me a 
lurking sense of being in aid of some ulterior design, probably well enough 
understood in that age, which perhaps time and criticism will reveal. The 
literature of the Middle Ages, issued under the jealous eye of a military despot- 



92 Appendix to Part I. 

ism, is extremely insidious ; often needs to be read between the lines; and 
there is deep suggestion in Bacon's saying that " we ought to be much 
beholden to Machiavel, who writes what men do, and not what they ought to 
do." In Machiavel himself what dark nobility, when in " The Prince" — that 
hideous masterpiece — at the utter cost of his fair fame, at the price of giving 
his very name to become a byword among men — he teaches the tyrant so 
minutely, and with such perfect candor, all the arts by which a free people 
may be subjugated, that the people become masters of the trick too! "The 
ostent evanescent" has its application to much of the great literature of those 
times — at least to the penetrating eye that finds the ostent of that literature 
deceitful; and it is impossible to believe that the greatest of the Elizabethan 
men could have sought to indoctrinate the ages with the love of feudalism 
which his own drama in its entirety, if the view taken of it herein be true, 
certainly and subtly saps and mines. The only supreme tyrant is Ignorance. 
To destroy this, as the Shakespeare drama assists to destroy it — to destroy this 
by teaching man the science of his own nature — is to deliberately forelay for 
the destruction of the whole Olympus of lesser tyrants, feudal and other, of 
which Ignorance is the Jove. If I sought to express the Shakespeare drama 
in the image of a person, I would not choose the eidolon of any feudal em- 
peror. My choice would be a man like P'rancis Bacon — so majestic in his 
presence, Osborne, his contemporary, says of him, that he awed all men upon 
occasion into reverence, and yet, continues Osborne, so much one of the com- 
monalty that he could pass from talk with a lord about his hawks and hounds 
to out- cant a London chirurgcon in his slang, so that all sorts of men thought 
him one of themselves; Francis Bacon, wise with all the lore of all the ages, 
the companion and counsellor of princes, the familiar of gypsies and tinkers 
and sailors as well; deep-eyed with long insight into the minds of men of 
every degree; master of multiform experiences; travelled, elegant, courtly, 
august, intrepid, loyal, gentle, compassionate, sorrowful, beautiful ; clothed 
from fondness for sumptuous apparel in purple three-piled velvet, rich 
laces and the hat with plumes, yet loving — another anecdote tells of him — to 
ride with bared head, in the warm and perfumed rains of spring, that he 
might feel upon him, he said, the universal spirit of the world! Such would 
be the image of the man I would choose to express the Shakespeare drama — 
an image, by the way, not much like the infamous caricature made of him 
by that brilliant thimble-rigging Scotch scoundrel, Macaulay, with the noble 
and honorable object of spiting Basil Montagu. 

Still, let it be distinctly admitted, although the imputation of feudalism may 
be rejected, the point of view in the Shakespeare drama is always that of the 
court. The court perfume streams, like a necessity of authorship, less from 
choice than circumstance, through all this mighty and beneficent creation. 
For the plebeian jioint of view, maintained unconsciously throughout, despite 
the learning, despite the patrician themes or characters chosen, despite even 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter — 1883. 93 

the voluptuous dainty elegance and charm of some of the lyrics and epigrams, 
contrast the works of Ben Jonson. The son of the bricklayer appears through- 
out, and it is the bricklayer's son of the mournful age of Elizabeth and James, 
before the people was born. Strange grace of chance if, in that age, the 
patrician spirit, which may easily be the natural birthright of any farmer or 
mechanic now — at least in this country — should have animated one as lowly 
born as Shakespeare, so as to tincture all his works with an odor, clinging as 
the musk of Nepaul ! But the fact cannot be unperceived — the outlook of 
the Shakespeare drama is from the court; the sympathy, though universal, is 
from the social above, never from the below; the implied life of the author is 
that of the gently born and bred, not of the tradesman or the laborer. In 
every page we feel the superior social grade. It is the best spirit of the best 
Elizabethan noble. One would say the author was a lord. Truly — but a lord 
as Buddha was a prince. 

The times have gone by when the court was the generalization of the 
nation, and the typical man, either as person or poet, was necessarily of the 
aristocracy. The change has come to pass which the great Elizabethan men 
darkly toiled to accomplish, in an age when the new was stirring in the old — 
the dawn of which appeared for a little while a few years after they had passed 
away, in the Commonweal of Vane and Hampden, which Cromwell quenched 
in cloud. In every country in Christendom the people has been born, and in 
this has come to sovereignty. That democratic sovereignty, a political fact 
here to-day, will be a social fact here to-morrow, and of that fact in its present 
and its future, and of that New World which is the arena of its evolution, 
Walt Whitman is the poet, and Leaves of Grass is the poem. The very resist- 
ance to the work, as when a foreign journal denounced "its rank republican 
insolence," proves its democratic scope and character; the very criticism of 
its foes, who " cannot dispraise but in a sort of praise," supports its claim. 
Next in the order of intellectual succession to Shakespeare, its author appears 
in his typical mechanic's garb, as the portrait in the book shows him, a work- 
man sprung from a race of workmen, a representative poet of the people ; 
such here specifically, and collaterally throughout the world. " The people — 
the poor," says a recent reviewer, sympathetically defining. Alas ! no : the 
poor are not the people ! " The poor," says Victor Hugo, " are the mourn- 
ful commencement of the people ! " The people are the inhabitants of the 
country when political organization has secured for them the power of the 
sceptre, and social organization has endowed them with the opulence of the 
crown. From power and wealth in equitable distribution results the great 
spiritual patrician race worthy to be called the people. That race in its 
mighty infancy is here — a baby Hercules, who in its cradle has strangled 
monsters, and whose manhood and the labors of whose manhood are to come. 

I have gazed for years into this grand orb of poetiy ; I have mused upon 



94 Appendix to Part I. 

its wild elegance and splendor, its tranquil and candid reproduction of things 
gross and delicate as they are in the sphere of the great Pan, its august mascu- 
line and feminine ideals, its teeming shows of historic and current life, its 
magic changing palingenesis of the populous cities, the diversified landscapes, 
the picturesque solitudes, the genrd male and female figures, the infinite fauna 
and flora, the skies, mountains, streams, prairies of our Continental West, all 
recreated here in their several idiosyncrasies, under every diversity of times and 
seasons, vital and magnetic, a scenic whole exhaling delicious natural odors, 
swept by free winds, alive and moving in harmony to the marching measures, 
the glorious rolling music of a rhythmus, caught, one might divine, from the 
movements, copious and unequal, of the surf sweeping in forever upon the 
beaches where the poet wandered as a child. I have brooded long upon it 
all, and I have compared it with the famous poems of the supreme men of all 
ages, and found it in no wise inferior to the best, as many besides me have 
felt, and the near future will declare; but I should shrink, faint-hearted in my 
conscious inferiority, from any effort at its adequate interpretation. It spreads 
before us all, a superb cosmorama of the West, populous, colossal and golden, 
under the ascending race of the rejoicing sun. Who am I that I should un- 
fold the mystic reminiscences of this Universal Poem, reveal its oracular sug- 
gestions, comment upon its sublime annunciations, interpret its prophetic 
voices, declare anything of what it is to every reader with an awakened soul ? 
Sometimes I think it might be considered the poem of embodiment. It 
indicates the august kosmic fact of numberless material entities held in 
cohesion by spirit, which ni time loosens and departs. In a more restricted 
consideration, it appears as the poem of the embodied human soul. Other 
writers have celebrated the body, others the spirit, until we feel them almost 
in disconnection. Take, as opposing poles, Rabelais and Shelley. In Rabelais 
there is a creation, gross, enormous, carnal, full-blown, laughing, obscene, 
alimentative, bibulous, excrementitious, loathsome and magnificent. It is the 
fearful apotheosis of the flesh, the monstrous apocalypse of the abdomen be- 
come lord paramount — man submerged in his lusts and appetites. The con- 
ception could only have proceeded from a mighty intellect and a great moral 
nature. In Shelley there is evolved an image, phantasmal, super-celestial, 
inessential, divinely wan and lovely, the ghost become consubstantial with a 
music unearthly and wandering, a shape of woven perfume, an odic force 
grown palely visible, a perceived pneuma, an apprehended essence, an ethereal 
apparition, the presence of the violet-breathing night-wind of the spring. The 
eidolon of his poetry is as incredible in its beauty as in its utter removal from 
carnality. It is like a dream of the soul remembered in a dream. Its extreme 
sublimation will forever make it incomprehensible to any but the most im- 
aginative minds — to aught but the clairvoyant sense that comes into rapport 
with thought clinging to the dim boundaries of the world: and Shelley can 
never have the fame his genius deserves, so far is his work removed from the 



Mr. O'Connor's Letter — 1883. 95 

reality and^passion of our lives. His merits as a poet are inexpressible. Not 
least among them is the altogether new ideal of woman, radiant, heroic, noble, 
and exalte, which appears in his pages. His poetry suggests in its furthest 
rapt remove from realization, almost from apprehension, the unbodied soul. 
The athletic spirituality of Leaves of Grass has no kinship to the spirit of the 
" Gargantua," and it is far nearer to the divine afflatus of the " Epipsychidion." 
But the creation of the book is its author's own — as original as sui genei-is — 
and that creation is, within the limits of the present reference, the strongest, 
amplest, most definite projection of the soul incarnate — of the representative 
human being — which has ever been thrown into literature. In it the spirit 
and the flesh appear as a unit, in perfect equilibrium, in the mutual interpene- 
tration and consubstantiality appropriate to the ideal Adam. Were humanity 
to disappear from the globe, and this poem alone to remain, the being of an- 
other species than ours, finding it among the ruins, could recover from its 
pages full knowledge of what manner of man had inhabited here, as surely as 
Lamarck or Owen from the fossil vestiges can reconstruct the vanished masto- 
don. The great affirmation which pervades the whole conception is the 
veracity of consciousness. Let us bow down before this supreme word ! Be- 
hind it there is nothing. It indicates the true finality, and in it is the entire 
proof of life. To be aware is all. To be aware is to be. Memory — the 
personal past — is consciousness retained : anticipation — the personal future — 
IS consciousness projected. • It is this divine fact that the poet, as he himself 
says, sings in so many ecstatic songs, and out of it has emerged his transcend- 
ent conception of the incarnate soul — the human creature, male or female, 
the female equal to the male — the being, dual and unitary at once, like the 
globe of two hemispheres — the insulated identity, type of all human identities, 
the woman, the man. A creature of substantial body, parts and passions ; 
divine in every organ and attribute, not one of which is to be omitted or con- 
temned in celebration, since each and all are intermutual in their adaptation, 
as they must be in an organic whole ; infinite and omnigenous in character, 
without origin and without end, and grown and growing through sympathy 
by the accrument of myriad experiences; shaped, propelled, developed alike 
by good and evil, as under the mechanical law of the composition of rival 
forces, effects are resultant ; prepared for m the earthly advent by all the 
cyclic preparations of the globe, and continued in endless course by all 
the operations of things; eternal m personal identity, the phases at once 
merged and retained, as infancy is both lost and kept in childhood, childhood 
in youth, youth in maturity, and so on forever ; fathomless, abysmal, immense 
and interminable as Nature, to which he or she is related as a constant vital 
influence forever influenced ; representative, at any given stage of his or her 
evolution, of the innumerable lower beings, progressing to that level, to sink in 
turn that level, and continue on; representative, m the best estate, of the intrinsic 
spiritual greatness and majesty of each and all of the rest through whatever the 



^6 Appendix to Part I, 

pitiable, grotesque or vile disguises of appearance incident to the processes of 
transformation ; heir to an omnific personal destiny which is alike the destiny 
of each and all ; governed through all the nature by the egoistic pride, and by 
love and the necessity for love, as by two paramount vital springs; conscious 
at the summit of the highest knowledge of the eternal mystery in which all 
beings must remain to each, and of the eternal mystery one must be to one's- 
self ; and, from that lofty summit, joyous, haughty, transfigured in the sense 
of the democratic constitution of the Universe, in which all between the worm 
and the god are equal, being all organically necessary to the whole, and of 
which perpetual ascension, perpetual transfer and promotion, is the law. Such, 
in my apprehension, and in a crude, didactic account of it, is this majestic con- 
ception, which, in the poet's work, is expressed in a thousand magnetic and 
eloquent sentences, in a thousand vivid and wondrous verbal pictures, and 
with a power of alto-relievo statement and illustration which the fancy-dealers 
in letters can never deal in. It is far enough removed from the conception 
wherewith Mr. Harlan's Messiah, Wesley, startled England, when he defined 
man as " half brute and half devil." The body is the temple of the Holy 
Ghost, says the rapt apostle ; and of this text Walt Whitman's book is, within 
the limitations of this view of it, the ample, the electric, the robust and un- 
rivalled commentary. As such it offers a new foundation for our philosophy, 
our politics, our life, above all for our religion — a religion to be greater than 
the world has ever seen, and worthy of these shores. 

To others better equipped for the grateful labor, I will leave it to descant 
upon what is correlated to the conception I have so imperfectly touched — the 
matchless presentation of the representative man and woman of this country. 
In Shakespeare there are no ideals in the sense of exemplars of human ex- 
cellence, or if so to any degree, it is in artistic and moral subordination to 
what seems his main aim, namely, to create types or models showing the 
operation of the perturbations or tempests of the mind. In Leaves of Gi-ass 
the ideals are distinct, and nothing could be more resplendent or commanding. 
They will haunt the imagination of this country, they will haunt the imagina- 
tion of the world, until they are realized in " the life that shall be copious, 
vehement, spiritual, bold," which the poet prophesies — in "the great indi- 
viduals, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed" — in 
" the breeds of the most perfect mothers" — " the myriads of youths, beautiful, 
gigantic, sweet-blooded" — "the race of splendid and savage old men" — " the 
hundred millions of superb persons," which appear in his sublime annuncia- 
tion as belonging to the future of America. Women have especial cause to 
be grateful to Walt Whitman. The noblest ideal of woman ever contributed 
appears in his pages. His supreme presentation of her in the natural privi- 
lege of her motherhood — in her all-enclosing, all-determining and divine 
maternity, is of more than any former majesty, and is unparalleled in philo- 
sophic depth and truth, as it is in august and tender beauty. I would fain 



Mr. O'Connors Letter — 1883. 97 

dwell upon this feature of his book, as I would upon the crowded and splendid 
cartoon of the United States, in all their diversified truth of essence and ap- 
pearance, in all their multiplicity and variety of life, which his pages offer 
broadly to contemplation. There are few national works which have so fully 
imaged the distinctive form of a land and its people. Homer has given to 
the ages a wondrous picture of the old Pelasgic civilization ; Rome, when the 
city was the world, glows in the tragic light of dying liberty and virtue in the 
mighty pages of Juvenal ; amidst the great fulgurations of the laughter of 
Rabelais, we see the gross swarming life of old Paris and Touraine ; and 
France, as in the magic mirror of Agrippa, in all the horror and grandeur of 
the feudal past, the revolutionary combat and the anguish of the present, the 
superb promise of the future, and in the supreme glory of compassion which 
streams from the poet's own mighty heart, lives in the poetry, the drama, the 
romance of the illustrious Victor Hugo; but in what poem have all the things 
which make up the show of a people's life appeared with such comprehensive 
and vivid reality, such national distinctiveness and such strength of charm, as 
in Leaves of Grass ? Above all, the wonder of it is, to me, the marvel that what 
M'as thought commonplace and prosaic is restored in the book to the superbest 
poetry by the revelation of its intrinsic significance — by the establishment of 
its mystical relation. The common objects as well as the most beautiful and 
striking — the ordinary events and incidents as well as those of the greater 
series — the rude, plain, simple, unlettered people, as well as the elevated and 
heroic — all appear in the poem in an equality of consideration, unrobbed of 
the deep interior value which truly belongs to every figure, to every object and 
emblem in the divine procession of life. Such mighty and democratic hand- 
ling of a theme, without rejection or evasion, reveals the great master, just as 
the true sculptor is seen, when, after you have gazed at a number of the stone 
dolls which adorn our Capitol, in which the fact of the genr6 costume is com- 
monly sought to be dodged by the artifice of a marmoreal cloak, you turn to 
David's noble bronze of Jefferson, in which the grace, the strength, the fire, 
the life of the. figure are fused into every detail of the frankly rendered old 
colonial garb. The great master is equally revealed in the poems of the war 
for the Union, around which the orbit of the book is now arranged. Of these 
poems it may be said that they alone of all the song born from that struggle 
are in the true key. Apart from their clear, fresh and vital picturing— the sad 
and stormy truth and color of their scenery — they are surcharged with the 
peculiar tragic pathos which civil war must always inspire in hearts deeply 
noble, and will be accepted in all our latitudes, North and South alike, since 
they can be read without unmanly exultation by the victor, and without 
humiliation by the vanquished. The word " Reconciliation" spans them all: 

Word over all, beautiful as the sky ; 

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost. 
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash ag»in, and ever again, 
this soiled world ; 

9 



98 Appendix to Part I. 

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, 

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the cofTin — I draw near. 

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. 

A few years ago there was an old man in this city, an eminent officer of the 
government, formerly a judge, with whom I sometimes conversed, and the 
idol of whose thought and life was Jefferson. He set great value upon 
Leaves of Grass, but the works and life of the author of the Declaration 
of Independence made his central theme, of which he never wearied, nor, 
indeed, made others weary, he discoursed upon it so eloquently well. He 
has passed from among us; but I can still see in memory, his old, wrinkled, 
earnest, smiling face, and dark, sunken eyes tinged around with black, and 
hear his low, eager voice, as with the ardor of a boy he unrolled his disserta- 
tion upon some sentence of the sage of Monticello, or, kindling into some 
niagian gloss upon his text, foretold in a sort of measured ecstasy the complete 
ultimate triumph of the democratic principle, and the transfiguration of govern- 
ment and society in the operation of the ideas of his master. But always as 
the climax of his rapt argument, or at the close of any stage thereof, before it 
mounted to a higher proposition, he would say, bending his old head forward, 
his voice trembling with intensity, his face glowing into a deeper wizard smile, 
his dark eyes shining in their swarthy circles — " and here," he would exclaim, 
"here is where our glorious Walt comes in and confirms Jefferson!" No de- 
scription could convey a sense of the tone of utter satisfaction and triumph ift 
v^fhich he announced his prophet confirmed by his poet, nor of the tremulous 
fervor, the supreme unction with which the words " our glorious Walt" were 
uttered. I take the remembrance of those words, as I would a wild flower 
from the kind old scholar's grave, and lay it on our poet's book as my latest 
offering, worth more than the little tribute I hav* ever brought, or all that I 
could ever bring. " Our glorious Willy" was the phrase the author of the 
"Faery Queen" threw, like a star, upon the name of Shakespeare, in the days 
■when the term " a willy" was simply a euphuism for " a poet," and no more. 
"Our glorious Walt," the utterance of lips that fondly loved the name of 
Jefferson, and yielded the words in homage to the bard who has carried into 
literature earth's greatest dream, is at least an honor equal to that Spenser gave, 
and goes to an object no less worthy of such honor. For to have conceived and 
written Leaves 0/ Grass — to have been of the old heroic strain of which such 
books alone are born — to have surcharged the pages with their world of noble 
and passionate life — to have done all this, to have dared all this, to have suf- 
fered for all this — is to be the true brother of Shakespeare. 

Pardon my imperfect contribution to your volume. You know how hastily 
I have written, using the little tjme left by tlie pressing tasks of the Life-Saving 
Service. And with cordial wishes for the success of your book. 
Believe me, Dear Sir, 

Faithfully yours, 

William Douglas O'Cpnnor. 



THE GOOD GRAY POET. 

A VINDICATION. 

Washington, D. C, Sept. 2, 1865. 

Nine weeks have elapsed since the commission of an outrage, to which I 
have not till now been able to give my attention, but which, in the interest of 
the sacred cause of free letters, and in that alone, I never meant should pass 
without its proper and enduring brand. 

For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, 
in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two 
hours ago, tallying, one might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit 
to have for his background and accessories thtir streaming populations and 
ample and rich facades, a man of striking masculine beauty — a poet — powerful 
and venerable in appearance ; large, calm, superbly formed ; oftenest clad in 
the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people ; re- 
sembling, and generally taken by strangers for some great mechanic or steve- 
dore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly 
in this guise, with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the 
sunliglit and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually 
wears was, when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the 
moment in his hand ; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his 
uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders 
with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenance, serene, 
proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the 
features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes ; the eyebrows and eye- 
lids especially showing that fulness of arch seldom seen save in the antique 
busts ; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and tempering with 
a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity 
and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling 
collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form sur- 
rounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health 
and vigor, the august charm of the strong. 

We who have looked upon this figure, or listened to that clear, cheerful, 
vibrating voice, might thrill to think, could we but transcend our age, that we 
had been thus near to one of the greatest of the sons of men. But Dante 
stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as he walks the streets of Florence ; 
that shabby, one-armed soldier, just out of jail and hardly noticed, though he 

(99) 



100 Appendix to Part I. 

has amused Europe, is Michael Cervantes ; that son of a vine-dresser, whom 
Athens laughs at as an eccentric genius, before it is thought worth while to 
roar him into exile, is the century-shaking /Eschylus ; that phantom whom 
the wits of the seventeenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and 
the wits of the eighteenth century, spUittering with laughter, call a barbarian, 
is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained ploughman, with the noble 
heart and sweet bright eyes, abominated by the good and patronized by the 
gentry, subject now of anniversary banquets by gentlemen who, could tliey 
wander backward from those annual hiccups into time, would never help his 
life or keep his company — is Robert Burns ; and this man, .vhose grave, per- 
haps, the next century will cover with passionate and splendid honors, goes 
regarded with careless curiosity or phlegmatic composure by his own age. 
Yet, perhaps, in a few hearts he has waked that deep thrill due to the passage 
of the sublime. I heard lately, with sad pleasure,* of the letter introducing a 
friend, filled with noble courtesy, and dictated by the reverence for genius, 
which a distinguished English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American 
bard. Nothing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the scholar 
Alcott, like the bold sentence " Greater than Plato," which he once uttered 
upon him. I hold it the surest proof of Thoreau's insight, that after a ct)n- 
versation, seeing how he incarnated the immense and new spirit of the age, 
and was the compend of America, he came away to speak the electric sentence, 
" He is Democracy !" I treasure to my latest hour, with swelling heart and 
springing tears, the remembrance that Abraham Lincoln, seeing him for the 
first time from the window of the east room of the White House as he passed 
slowly by, and gazing at him long with that deep eye which read men, said, 
in the c[uaint, sweet tone, which those who have spoken with him will remember, 
and with a significant emphasis which the type can hardly convey, " Well, he 
looks like a Man!" Sublime tributes, great words; but none too high for 
their object, the author of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, of Brooklyn. 

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author was dismissed, 
under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he had held for six 
months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal was the act of the 
Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department, formerly a Methodist 
clergyman, and president of a Western college. 

Upon the interrogation of an eminent oflicer of the Government, at whose 
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr. Har- 
lan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the discharge 
of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could learn, his conduct had 
been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few months of his tenure of office, 

* Pleasure a mean lie saddened. Stopping en route at Cambridge, the bearer of this letter 
was informed by one of its most distinguished resident authors, that Walt Whitman was 
" nothing but a low New York rowdy," " a common street blackguard," and he accordingly 
did not venture to present the letter. 



TJie Good Gray Poet. (i865-'6). loi 

he had been promoted. The sole and only cause of his dismissal, Mr. Har- 
lan said, was that he had written the book of poetry entitled Leaves of Grass. 
This book Mr. Harlan characterized as " full of indecent passages." The 
author, he said, was "a very bad man," a " free lover." Argument being 
had upon these propositions. Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly un- 
able to maintain his assertions, and, as regards the author, was forced to own 
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this substan- 
tial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke his action. Of 
course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the proudest man that 
lives, have consented to again enter into office under Mr. Harlan ; but the de- 
mand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the gentleman who made it as 
the refusal to accede to it was discreditable to the Secretary. 

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct conse- 
quence of Mr. Harlan's course, was its remission to the scurrilous, and in 
some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To sum up, an 
author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago, of an honest book, 
which no intelligent and candid person can regard as hurtful to morality, was 
expelled from office by the Secretary, and held up to public contumely by the 
newspapers. It only remains to be added here, that the Hon. James Harlan 
is the gentleman who, upon assuming the control of the Department, pub- 
lished a manifesto, announcing that it was thenceforth to be governed " upon^ 
the principles of Christian civilization." 

This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage to which I 
referred in my opening paragraph. 

I have had the honor, which I esteem a very high one, to know Walt Whit- 
man intimately for several years, and am conversant with the details of his 
life and history. Scores and scores of persons, who know him well, can con- 
firm my own report of him, and I have therefore no hesitation in saying that 
the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan, derived from whom I know not, as 
to his being a bad man, a free lover, etc., belong to the category of those 
calumnies at which, as Napoleon said, innocence itself is confounded. A 
better man in all respects, or one more irreproachable in his relations to the 
other sex, lives not upon this earth. His is the great goodness, the great 
chastity of spiritual strength and sanity. I do not believe that from the hour 
of his infancy, when Lafayette held him in his arms, to the present hour, in 
which he bends over the last wounded and dying of the war, any one can say 
aught of him, which does not consort with the largest and truest manliness. 
I am perfectly aware of the miserable lies which have been put into circula- 
tion respecting him, of which the story of his dishonoring an invitation to 
dine with Emerson, by appearing at the table of the Astor House in a red 
shirt, and with the manners of a rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know too the 
inferences drawn by wretched fools, who, because they have seen him riding 
apon the top of an omnibus; or at Pfaff's restaurant; or dressed in rough 



I02 Appendix to Part I. 

clotlies suitable for his purposes, and only remarkable because the wearer was 
a man of genius ; or mixing freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabe- 
lais, like Francis Bacon, like Rembrandt, like all great students of the world, 
with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with those of a dif- 
ferent character, must needs set him down as a brute, a scallawag, and a 
criminal. Mr. Harlan's allegations are of a piece with these. If I could as- 
sociate the title with a really great person, or if the name of man were not 
radically superior, I should say that for solid nobleness of character, for na- 
tive elegance and delicacy of soul, for a courtesy which is the very passion of 
thoughtful kindness and forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect 
and manly honor for woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest 
details of life, and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes 
the civilities of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whit- 
man deserves to be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this con- 
tinent. I know well the habits and tendencies of his life. They are all 
simple, sane, domestic, worthy of him as one of an estimable family and 
a member of society. He is a tender and faithful son, a good brother, 
a loyal friend, an ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, 
working successively as a farmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has been a 
stalwart editor of the Republican party, and often, in that powerful and 
. nervous prose of which he is master, done yeoman's service for the great 
cause of human liberty and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union. 
He has been a visitor of prisons, a protector of fugitive slaves, i constant 
voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the beginning of the 
war to the present time ; a brother and friend through life to the neglected 
and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the criminal, the outcast, turning 
away from no man for his guilt, nor woman for her vileness. His is the 
strongest and truest compassion I have ever known. I remember here the 
anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting in a by-street in Boston a poor 
ruffian, one whom he had known well as an innocent child, now a fullgrown 
youth, vicious far beyond his years, flying to Canada from the pursuit of the police, 
his sin-trampled features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New 
York, in which, as he supposed, he had killed some one; and having heard 
his hurried story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from 
the bad even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil 
feeling for the ruined being, and with a love which makes me think of that 
love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at parting, after assisting 
him from his means, held him for a moment, with his arm around his neck, 
and, bending to the face, horrible and battered and prematurely old, kissed him 
on the cheek, and the poor hunted wretch, perhaps for the first time in his low 
life, receiving a token of love and compassion like a touch from beyond the 
sun, hastened away in deep dejection, sobbing and in tears. It reminds me 
of the anecdotes Victor Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under 



The Good Gray Poet.{\Z(>^-6). 103 

a thin veil of fiction, of Charles Miolles, the good Bishop of Digne. I know 
not what talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be an unexcluding friend- 
liness and goodness which is felt upon his approach like magnetism; but I 
know that in the subterranean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes 
safely ; and I could recite instances where hands that, in mere wantonness of 
ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of their own accord been 
lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, have been dragged promptly 
down by others ; this, too, I mean, when he and the assaulting gang were 
mutual strangers. I have seen singular evidence of the mysterious quality 
which not only guards him, but draws to him with intuition, rapid as light, 
simple and rude people, as to their natural mate and friend. I remember, as 
I passed the White House with him one evening, the startled feeling with which 
I saw a soldier on guard there — a stranger to us both, and with something in 
his action that curiously proved that he was a stranger — suddenly bring his 
musket to the "present" in military salute to him, quickly mingling with this 
respect due to his colonel, a gesture of greeting with the right hand as to a 
comrade, grinning, meanwhile, good fellow, with shy, spontaneous affection 
and deference, his ruddy, broad face glowing in the flare of the lampions. I 
remember, on another occasion, as I crossed the street with him, the driver of 
a street-car, a stranger, stopping the conveyance, and inviting him to get on 
and ride with him. Adventures of this kind are frequent, and " I took a fancy 
to you," or " You look like one of my style," is the common explanation he 
gets upon their occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the per- 
sonal adhesion and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous instances 
on sight, by multitudes of plain persons, sailors, mechanics, drivers, soldiers, 
farmers, sempstresses, old people of the past generation, mothers of families — 
those powerful, unlettered persons, among whom, as he says in his book, he 
has gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect as an author him 
whom they love as a man, and who loves them in return. 

His intellectual influence upon many young men and women — spirits of 
the morning sort, not willing to belong to that intellectual colony of Great 
Britain which our literary classes compose, nor helplessly tied, like them, to 
the old forms — I note as kindred to that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient 
Attica, or Raleigh upon the gallant young England of his day. It is a power 
at once liberating, instructing, and inspiring. — His conversation is a university. 
Those who have heard him in some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his 
spirit moved him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was accom- 
plished. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic of the great 
music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some of the best books, especially 
those of the Bible, which he prefers above all other great literature, but prin- 
cipally by contact and communion with things themselves, which literature 
can only mirror and celebrate. He has travelled through most of the United 
States, intent on comprehending and absorbing the genius and history of his 



I04 Appendix to Part I. 

country, tliat he might do his best to start a literature worthy of her, sprung 
from her own [loiity, and tallying her own unexampled magnilicence among 
the nations. To the same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious 
student of life, mixing intimately with all varieties of experience and men, 
with curiosity and with love. He has given his thought, his life, to this beau- 
tiful ambition, and, still young, he has grown gray in its service. He has 
never married ; like Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the service of 
his fellow-creatures his bclla donna, his best beloved, his bride. His patriot- 
ism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment ; it is a personal passion. 
He performs with scrupulous fidelity and zeal the duties of a citizen. For 
eighteen years, not missing once, his ballot has dropped on every national and 
local election day, and his influence has been ardently given for the good 
cause. Of all men I know, his life is most in the life of the nation. I re- 
member, when the first draft was ordered, at a time when he was already per- 
formmg an arduous and perilous duty as a volunteer attendant upon the 
wounded in the field — a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in 
his life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result of poison 
absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of hospital gangrene, and when it 
would have been the easiest thing in the world to evade duty, for though then 
only forty-two or three years old, and subject to the draft, he looked a hale 
sixty, and no enrolling officer would have paused for an instant before his 
gray hair — I remember, I say, how anxious and careful he was to get his 
name put on the enrolment lists, that he might stand his chance for martial 
service. This, too, at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodg- 
ing, agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable device to escape 
military duty. What music of speech, though Cicero's own — what scarlet 
and gold superlatives could adorn or dignify this simple, antique trait of 
private heroism ? — I recall his love for little children, for the young, and for 
very old persons, as if the dawn and the evening twilight of life awakened 
his deepest tenderness. I recall the affection for him of numbers of young 
men, and invariably of all good women. Who, knowing him, does not re- 
gard him as a man of the highest spiritual culture? I have never known one 
of greater and deeper religious feeling. To call one like him good seems an 
impertinence. In our sweet country phrase, he is one of God's men. And 
as I write these hurried and broken memoranda — as his strength and sweet- 
ness of nature, his moral health, his rich humor, his gentleness, his serenity, 
his charity, his simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and varied knowl- 
edge of life and men, his calm wisdom, his singular and beautiful boy-inno- 
cence, his personal majesty, his rough scorn of mean actions, his magnetic 
and exterminating anger on due occasions — all that I have seen and heard of 
him, the testimony of associates, the anecdotes of friends, the remembrance 
of hours with him that should be immortal, the traits, lineaments, incidents of 
his life and being — as they come crowding into memory — his seems to me a 



The Good Gray Poet. (1865 -'6). 105 

character which only the heroic pen of Plutarch could record, and which 
Socrates himself might emulate or envy. 

This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having written a bad book. 
I might ask, How long is it since bad books have been the flower of good 
lives? How long is it since grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees thistles? 
But Mr. Harlan says the book is bad because it is " full of indecent passages." 
This allegation has been brought against Leaves of Grass before. It has 
been sounded long and strong by many of the literary journals of both conti- 
nents. As criticism it is legitimate. I may contemn the mind or deplore the 
moral life in which such a criticism has its source ; still, as criticism it has a 
right to existence. But Mr. Harlan, passing the limits of opinion, inaugu- 
rates punishment. He joins the band of the hostile verdict; he incarnates 
their judgment; then, detaching himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal 
vengeance. As far as he can have it so, this author, for having written his 
book, shall starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. 
This is the essence of Mr. Harlan's action. It is a dark and serious step to 
take. Upon what grounds is it taken ? 

I have carefully counted out from Walt Whitman's poetry the lines, per- 
fectly moral to me, whether viewed in themselves or in the light of their sub- 
lime intentions and purport, bnt upon which ignorant and indecent persons of 
respectability base their sweeping condemnation of the whole work. Taking 
Leaves of Grass, and the recent small volume, "Drum-Taps" (which was in 
Mr. Harlan's possession), there are in the whole about nine thousand lines 
or verses. From these, including matter which I can hardly imagine olijec- 
tionable to any one, but counting everything which the most malignant virtue 
could shrink from, I have culled eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine 
thousand ! It is a less proportion than one finds in Shakespeare. Upon this 
so slender basis rests the whole crazy fabric of American and European slan- 
der and the brutal lever of the Secretary. 

Now, what by competent authority is the admitted character of the book 
in which these lines occur? For, though it is more than probable that Mr. 
Harlan never heard of the work till the hour of his explorations in the De- 
partment, the intellectual hemispheres of Great Britain and America have 
rung with it from side to side. It has received as extensive a critical notice, 
I suppose, as has ever been given to a volume. Had it been received only 
with indifference or derision, I should not have been surprised. In an age 
in which few breathe the atmosphere of the grand literature — which forgets 
the superb books and thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thack- 
eray a real satirist — which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to Herodotus, and 
to Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, and in which the chairs of criti- 
cism seem abandoned to squirts, and pedagogues, and monks — a mighty poet 
has little to expect from the literary press save unconcern and mockery. But 
even under these hard conditions the tremendous force of this poet has 



io6 Appendix to Part I. 

achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press denotes his book as not 
merely great, but illustrious. Even the copious torrents of abuse which have 
been lavished upon it have, in numerous instances, taken the form of tribute 
to its august and mysterious power, being in fact identical with that still 
vomited upon Montaigne and Juvenal. On the other hand, eulogy, very lofty 
and from the highest sources, has spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our 
noblest scholar, a name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of 
piercing insight and full comprehension, has pronounced it " the most extra- 
ordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." How 
that austere and rare spirit, Thoreau, regarded it may be partly seen by his 
last posthumous volume. He thought of it, I have heard, with measureless 
esteem, ranking it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the Oriental 
bards. It has been reported to me that unpublished letters, received in this 
country from some of Europe's greatest, announce a similar verdict. The 
" North American Review," unquestionably the highest organ of American 
letters, in the course of a eulogistic notice of the work, remarking upon the 
passages which Mr. Harlan has treated as if they were novel in literature, ob- 
serves: "There is not anything, perhaps (in the book), which modern usage 
would stamp as more indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is 
not a word in it meant to attract readers by its grossness as there is in half 
the literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on the 
tables of our drawing-rooms." The London " Dispatch," in a review writ- 
ten by the Rev. W. J. Fox, one of the most distinguished clergymen in Eng- 
land, after commending the poems for " their strength of expression, their 
fervor, their hearty wholesomeness, their originality and freshness, their sin- 
gular harmony," etc., says that, " in the unhesitating frankness of a man who 
dares to call simplest things by their plain names, conveying also a large sense 
of the beautiful," there is involved "a clearer conception of what manly 
modesty really is than in anything we have in all conventional forms of word, 
deed, or act, so far known of," and concludes by declaring that " the author 
will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in 
time will become a pregnant text-book, from which quotations as sterling as 
the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form of the inner and the 
outer life." The London " Leader," one of the foremost of the British liter- 
ary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches perception of the true 
character and purport of the book than any I have seen, has the following 
sentences : 

" Mr. Emerson recognized the first issue of the Leaves, and hastened to 
welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said 
Emerson to the new avatar, ' I greet you at the beginning of a great career 
which yet viust have had a long fore^rotoid somciolicre for such a starts 
The last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated 
the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing 
nothing to in^truction. The authority for so treating the author was derived 



The Good Gray Poet.{\'^6^-6). 107 

from himself, who thus described in one of his poems, his person, character, 
and name, having omitted the last from the title-page, 

'Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. 
Disorderly, fleshy, and sensual,' — 

and in various other passages confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues, 
of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the 
sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero sup- 
posed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word ' kosmos,' the writer was 
taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had 
been a long foreground somewhere or somehow ; — not so they. Every page 
teems with knowledge, with information ; but they saw it not, because it did 

not answer their purpose to see it The poem in which the word 

' kosmos ' appears explains in fact the whole mystery — nay, the word itself 
explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes every- 
body. It begins : 

' I celebrate myself, 

And what I assume, you shall assume; 
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.' 

In a word, Walt Whitman represents the kosmical man — he is the Adamus of 
the Nineteenth ce7ttitry — not an individual, but MANKIND. As such, in cele- 
brating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, 
and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five senses, beginning with 
that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the intellectual, rational, and moral 
powers, showing throughout his treatment an intimate acquaintance with 
Kant's transcendental method, and perhaps including in his development the 
whole of the German school, down to Hegel — at any rate as interpreted by 
Cousin and others in France and Emerson in the United States. He cer- 
tainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the egotist as the only true philosopher, 
and consistently identifies himself not only w ilh every man, but with the uni- 
verse and its Maker ; and it is in doing so that the strength of his description 
consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks down on Good and 
Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the like measure of equity. . , . 
Instead, therefore, of regarding these Leaves of Grass as a marvel, they seem 
to us as the most natural product of the American soil. They are certainly 
filled with an American spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest 
American freedom." The passages characterized by the Secretary as " inde- 
cent" are, adds the " Leader," "only so many instances adduced in support 
of a philosophical principle, not meant for obscenity, but for scientific exam- 
ples, introduced, as they might be m any legal, medical, or philosophical 
book, for the purpose of instruction." 

I could multiply these excerpts ; but here are sufficient specimens of the 
competent judgments of eminent scholars and divines, testifying to the intel- 
lectual and moral grandeur of this work. Let it be remembered that there is 
nothing in the book that in one form or another is not contained in all great 
poetic or universal literature. It has nothing either in quantity or quality so 
offensive as everybody knows is in Shakespeare. All that this poet has done 
is to mention, without levity, without low language, very seriously, often de- 
voutly, always simply, certain facts in the natural history of man and of life, 



io8 Appendix to Part I. 

and sometimes, assuming their sanctity, to use them in illustration or imagery. 
Far more questionable mention and use of these facts are common to the 
greatest literature. Shall the presence in a book of eighty lines, similar in 
character to what every great and noble poetic book contains, be sufficient to 
shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius Arbiter, the dirty dramas 
of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of Louvet de Couvray ? to lump it in with 
the anonymous lascivious trash spawned in holes and sold in corners, too wit- 
less and disgusting for any notice but that of the police — and to entitle its author 
to treatment such as only the nameless wretches of the very sewers of author- 
ship ought to receive? 

If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add to the calami- 
ties of genius a misery so degrading and extreme as to imagine the great 
authors of the world condemned to clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I can at 
least mitigate that dream of wretchedness and insult by adding the fancy of 
their fate under the action of his principles. Let me suppose them there, and 
he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary into that of literary headsman. 
He opens the great book of Genesis. Everywhere " indecent passages." 
The mother hushes the child, and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first 
great history. It cannot be read aloud in " drawing-rooms " by " gentlemen" 
and " ladies." The freest use of language, the plainest terms, frank mention 
of forbidden subjects; the story of Onan, of Hagar and Sarai, of Lot and his 
daughters, of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech, of Jacob and Leah, of Reuben 
and Bilhah; of Potiphar's wife and Joseph; tabooed allusion and statement 
everywhere; no veils, no euphemism, no delicacy, no meal in the mouth any- 
where. Out with Moses! The cloven splendor on that awful brow shall not 
save him. 

Mr. Harlan takes up the Iliad and the Odyssey. The loves of Jupiter and 
Juno, the dalliance of Achilles and Patroclus with their women; the perfectly 
frank, undraped reality of Greek life and manners naively shown without re- 
gard to the feelings of Christian civilizees — horrible ! Out with Homer ! 

Here is Lucretius: Mr. Harlan opens the " De Rerum Natura," and reads 
the vast, benign, majestic lines, sad with the shadow of the intelligible uni- 
verse upon them; sublime with the tragic problems of the Infinite; august 
with their noble love and compassion for mankind. But what is this ? " Ut 
quasi transactis soepe omnibus rebus," etc. And this: " More ferarum quad- 
rupedumque magis ritu." And this : " Nam mulier prohibet se consipere 
atque repugnat," etc. And this : " Quod petiere, premunt arete, faciuntque 
dolorem," etc. Enough. Fine language, fine illustrations, fine precepts, 
pretty decency ! Out with Lucretius ! Out with the chief poet of the Tiber 
side! 

Here is ^schylus; a dark magnificence of cloud, all rough with burning 
gold, which thunders and drips blood ! The Greek Shakespeare. The gor- 
geous and terrible ^schylus ! What is this in the " Prometheus " about Jove 



The Good Gray Poet. (1865-6). 109 

and 16 ? What sort of detail is that which, at the distance of ten years, 
I remember amazed Mr. Buckley as he translated the Agamemnon ? What 
kind of talk is this in the " Choephori," in " The Suppliants," and in the frag- 
ments of the comic drama of " The Argians " ? Out with ^schylus ! 

Here is the sublime book of Ezekiel. All the Hebrew grandeur at its 
fullest is there. But look at this blurt of coarse words, hurled direct as the 
prophet-mouth can hurl them — this familiar reference to functions and organs 
voted out of language — this bread for human lips baked with ordure — these 
details of the scortatory loves of Aholah and Aholibah. Enough. Dismiss 
this dreadful majesty of Hebrew poetry. He has no "taste." He is " inde- 
cent." Out with Ezekiel ! 

Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the " Inferno." What is 
this about the she-wolf Can Grande will kill ? What picture is this of strum- 
pet Thais? — ending with the lines: 

"Taida e, la puttana che rispose 
Al drudo suo, quando disse : Ho io grazie 
Grandi appo te? Anzi meravigliose." 

What is this also in the eighteenth canto ? 

"Quivi venimmo, e quindi giCi nel fosso 
Vidi gente attuffata in uno stereo 
Che dagli uman privati parea mosso: 
E mentre ch' io 14 giu con I'occhio cerco, 
Vidi un col capo si di merda lordo, 
Che non parea s'era laico o cherco." 

What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John Car- 
lyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing ? 

"Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta." 

And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto : 

"Gi4 reggia, per mezzul perdere o luUa 
Com' io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia 
Rotto dal mento insin dove si trulla." 

That will do. Dante, too, has " indecent passages." Out with Dante ! 

Here is the book of Job : the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque 
pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, 
the whole overarching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the 
inevitable '• indecency." Instead of the virtuous fiction of the tansy bed, Job 
actually has the indelicacy to state how man is born — even mentions the belly ; 
talks about the gendering of bulls, and the miscarriage of cows ; uses rank 
idioms ; and in the thirty-first chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought 



no Appendix to Part I. 

and expression which it is amazing does not bring down upon him, even at 
this late date, the avalaHches of our lofty and pure reviews. Here is certainly 
" an immoral poet." Out with Job ! 

Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus, flower of historians. 
What have we now ? Traits of character not to be mentioned, incidents of 
conduct, accounts of manners, minute details of customs, which our modern 
historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out with Plutarch 
and Herodotus ! 

Here is Tacitus. What statement of crimes that ought not to be hinted ? 
Does the man gloat over such things? What dreadful kisses are these of 
Agrippina to Nero — the mother to the son ? Out with Tacitus ! And since 
there are books that ought to be publicly burned,* by all means let the stern 
grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame. 

Here is Shakespeare: "indecent passages" everywhere — every drama, 
every poem thickly inlaid with them ; all that men do displayed, sexual acts 
treated lightly, jested about, mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted ; 
slang, gross puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare ! 

Here is the Canticle of Canticles : beautiful, voluptuous poem of love 
literally, whatever be its mystic significance ; glowing with the color, odorous 
with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite 
and pure with the burning chastity of passion, which completes and exceeds 
the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to the Secretary ? Can 
he endure that the female form should stand thus in a poem, disrobed, un- 
veiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look at these voluptuous details, this 
expression of desire, this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and per- 
fume lavished upon the sensual. No ! Out with Solomon ! 

Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness, like the lion- 
roar of Jehovah above the guilty world, utters coarse words. Amidst the 
bolted lightnings of that sublime denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate 
figures, indecent allusions, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a mid- 
night landscape. Out with Isaiah ! 

Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of the unflinch- 
ing reporter of man ; the soul all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, 
sincerity, reality, eyesight. A few glances will suflice. Cant and vice and 
sniffle have groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne ! 

Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more ; a banquet of wine in a 
garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the laughing revellers high with 
festal joy ; but a heavenly flame burns on every brow ; a tone not of this 
sphere is in all the music, all the laughter, all the songs ; a light of the Infinite 
trembles over every chalice and rests on every flower ; and all the garden is 
divine. Still when Hafiz cries out, " Bring me wine, and bring the famed 

* Mr. Harlan had said that Leaves of Grass ought to be pubUcly burned. 



The Good Gray Poet.{\Z(i^-€). in 

veiled beauty, the Princess of the brothel," etc., or issues similar orders, Mr. 
Harlan, whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must 
deal sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz ! 

Here is Virgil, ornate and splendid poet of old Rome ; a master with a 
greater pupil, Alighieri — a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader 
and arises a soldier of mankind. But he must lose those fadeless chaplets, 
the undying green of a noble fame ; for here in the " .^Eneid " is " Dixerat; 
et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis," etc., and here in the " Georgics " is 
" Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat," etc., and there are other 
verses like these. Out with Virgil ! 

Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the " Conjugial Love," to 
me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with 
moonlight, of a great though broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains 
all here? "Lewd," "sensual," "lecherous," "coarse," "licentious," etc. 
Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from the tobacco- 
juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue. Out with Swedenborg! 

Here is Goethe : the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet silent over pages 
of " Wilhelm Meister : " that high and chaste book, the " Elective Affinities," 
still pumps up oaths from clergymen : Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar 
over Faust. Out with Goethe ! 

Here is Byron : grand, dark poet ; a great spirit — a soul like the ocean ; 
generous lover of America ; fiery trumpet of liberty ; a sword for the human 
cause in Greece ; a torch for the human mind in " Cain ; " a life that redeemed 
its every fault by taking a side, which was the human side ; tempest of scorn 
in his first poem, tempest of scorn and laughter in his last poem, only against 
the things that wrong man; vast bud of the Infinite that Death alone pre- 
vented from its vaster flower; immense, seminal, electrical, dazzling Byron. 
But Beppo — O ! But Don Juan — O, fie ! Not to mention the Countess 
Guiccioli — ah, me ! Prepare quickly the yellow envelope, and out with Byron ! 

Here is Cervantes: open "Don Quixote," paragon of romances, highest 
result of Spain, best and sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a 
laughing novel which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of Sancho 
Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork trees, and these coarse stories and 
bawdy words, and this free and gross comedy — is it to be endured ? Out with 
Cervantes ! 

Here is another, a sun of literature, moving in a vast orbit with dazzling 
plenitudes of power and beauty ; the one only modern European poet and 
novelist worthy to rank with the first; permanent among the fleeting; a demi- 
god of letters among the pigmies ; a soul of the antique strength and sadness, 
worthy to stand as the representative of the high thought and hopes of the 
Nineteenth century — Victor Hugo. Now open " Les Miserables." See the great 
passages which the American translator softens and the English translator 
tears away. Open this other book of his, " William Shakespeare," a book 



112 Appendix to Fart I. 

with only one grave fault, the omission of the wonls "a Poem" from the title- 
page ; a book whieh is the eourageous arch, the eompreheiuling sky of criticism, 
but which no American publisher will dare to issue, or if he does will expur- 
gate. Out with Hugo, of course! 

Here is Juvenal, terrible and splendid fountain o\ all satire; inspiration of 
all just censure; exemplar of all noble rage at baseness; satirist and moral- 
ist sublimed into the poet ; the scowl of the unclouded noon above the low 
streets of folly iind of sin. But what he withers, he also shows. The sun-stroke 
of his poetry reveals what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity o{ exposure 
is frightful. Mr. Harlan would make .short work of him. C>ut with Juvenal ! 

Open the divine " Apocalypse." What words are these among the tluinder- 
ings and lightnings and voices? Is this a poem to be read aloud in parlors? 
(for such appeai-s to be the test of propriety and purity). At least, John might 
have been a little more choice in language. Some of these texts are " indecent." 
Yes, indeed ! John must go ! 

Here is Spenser. Encyclop;vdic poet of the ideal chivalry. It is all there. 
Amadis, Esplandian, Tininte the White, Palmerin of England, all those 
Paladin romances were but the leaves ; this is the llower. A lost dream of valor, 
chastity, courtesy, glory — a dream that marks an age of human history — glim- 
mers here, Iax in these depths, and makes this unexplored obscurity divine. 
"But is the 'Faery Queen' such a book as you would wish to put into the 
hands of a lady?" What a question! Has it not been expurgated? Out 
with Spenser ! 

Here is another, a true soldier of the human emancipation; one who smites 
amid uproars of laughter; the master of Titanic farce; a whirlwind and earth- 
quake of derision — Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan ! One glimpse at 
the chapter which explains why the miles lengthen as you leave Paris, or at 
the details of the birth and nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out with 
Rabelais — out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls him! 

And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose pages you may read,* 
done from the Latin by Spedding into a magnificent golden thuiuler of Eng- 
lish, the absolute defence of the free spirit of the great authors, couplcil with 
stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and choose, as dastard and circmi- 
nate. Out with Lord Bacon ! 

Not him only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. Here 
is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite 
in marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints 
the Holland landscape, the Jew, the beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms 
of Eternity ; and his pictures have been called " indecent." Here is Mozart, 
his music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets; and it has been called 
"sensual." Here is Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new and 



* Novum Orsnuum ; Aphorism CXX. 



The Good Gray /i?^/. (1865-6). 113 

strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and suljlinne forms that tower above 
the ecnturies, and accost tlie Greek ; and his works have been called" bestial " I 
Out with them all! 

Now, except Virgil, for vassalage to literary moflels, and for grave and sad 
falsehood to liljcrty; except (ioethc for his lack of the final ecstacy of self- 
surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great mother, one's 
country; except Spenser for his remoteness, and Uyron for his immaturity, 
and there is not one of those I have named that does not belong to the first 
order of human intellect. But no need to make discriminations here; they 
are all great; they have all striven; they have all served. Moses, ilomer, 
Lucretius, /TCschylus, KzekicI, Dante, Job, Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, 
Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne, Ilafiz, Virgil, .Swedenborg, Goethe, 
I>yron, Cervantes, Hugo, Juvenal, John, Spenser, Rabelais, Jiacon, Phidias, 
Kemijrandt, Mozart, Angelo — these are among the demi-gods of human 
tliought; the souls that have loved and suffered for the race; the light- 
liringers, the teachers, the lawgivers, the consolers, the liberators, the inspired 
inspirers of mankind ; the noble and gracious beings who, in the service of 
humanity, have borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one 
of them that is not sacred in the eyes^of thoughtful men. But not one of them 
do the rotten taste and morals of the Nineteenth century spare. Not one of 
them is qualified to render work for bread under this Secretary ! Do I err ? Do 
I exaggerate? I write without access to the books I mention (it is fitting that 
this ])iece of insolent barbarism should have been committed in almost the 
only important American city which is without a public library !j — and with the 
exception of three or four volumes which I happen to have by me, I am 
obliged to rely for my statements on the memory of youthful readings, eight 
or ten years ago. But name me one book of the first order in which such 
passages as I refer to do not occur 1 Tell me who can — what poet of the 
first grade escapes this brand " immoral," or this spittle " indecent" ? 

If the great books are not, in the point under consideration, in the same 
moral category as Leaves of Grass, then why, either in translation or in the 
originals, either by a bold softening which dissolves the author's meaning, or 
]jy aljsolute excision, are they nearly all expurgated? Answer me that. By 
one process or the other, Brizeux, Gary, Wright, Gayley, Carlyle, everybody, 
expurgates Dante; Langhorne and others exjjurgate Plutarch; Potter and 
others ex|jurgate Tl-^schylus ; Gifford, Anthon and others expurgate Juvenal ; 
Creech, Watson and others expurgate Lucretius; Bowdlcr and others expur- 
gate .Shakesfieare ; Nott (I believe it is) expurgates liafiz; Wraxall and 
Wilbour expurgate Hugo; Kirkland, Hart and others expurgate Spenser; 
somebody expurgates Virgil; somebody expurgates Byron; the Oxford 
scholars dilute Tacitus ; Lord Derby expurgates Homer, besides making him 
as ridiculous as the plucked cock of Diogenes in translation ; several hands 
expurgate Goethe; and Archbishop Tillotson in design expurgates Moses, 



114 Appendix to Part I. 

Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the others — a job which Dr. 'Noah 
Webster executes, but, thank God, cannot popularize. What book is spared ? 
Nothing but a chain of circumstances, which one might fancy divinely 
ordained, saves us the relatively unmutilated Bible. Nearly every other great 
book bleeds. When one is not expurgated, the balance is restored by its being 
cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid conscience and courage of Mr. 
W^ight, we can read Montaigne in English without the omission of a single 
word. Thanks also to Smollett, Motteux and others, Cervantes has gone 
untouched, and we have not as yet a family Rabelais. Neither have we as 
yet a family Mankind nor a family Universe; but this is an oversight which 
will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God's works will also, doubtless, be 
expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not ? One step to this end is taken 
in the expurgation of Genius, which is His second manifestation, as Nature is 
His first! Go on, gentlemen! You will yet have things as " moral" as you 
desire ! 

I am aware that as far as his opinion, not his act, is concerned, Mr. Harlan, 
however unintelligently, represents to some extent the shallow conclusions of 
his age, and I know it will be said that if the great books contain these pas- 
sages, they ought to be expurgated. It is not my design to endeavor to put a 
quart into people who only hold a gill, nor would I waste time in endeavoring 
to convert a large class of persons whom I once heard Walt Wliitman de- 
scribe, with his usual Titanic richness and strength of phrase, as " the immut- 
able granitic pudding-heads of the world." But there is a better class than 
these ; and 1 am filled with measureless amazement, that persons of high in- 
telligence, living to the age of maturity, do not perceive, at least, the immense 
and priceless scientific and human uses of such passages, and the conse- 
quent necessity, transcending and quashing all minor considerations, of 
having them where they are. But look at these sad sentences — a complete 
and felicitous statement of the whole modern doctrine — in the pages of a 
man I love and revere : " The literature of three centuries ago is not decent 
to be read ; we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become 
a reader, and for that reason, as much as, or more than, anything else, litera- 
ture has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all you read." 
He goes on to argue that literature in the next century will be richer than 
in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute to it as an author — 
her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind that will not need expurgating. 
These, I repeat, are sad sentences. If they are true, Bowdler is right to 
expurgate Shakespeare, and Noah Webster the Bible. But no, they are not 
true! I welcome woman into art; but when she comes there grandly, she 
will not come either as expurgator or creator of emasculate or partial forms. 
Woman, grand in art, is Rosa Bonheur, painting with fearless pencil the 
surly, sublime Jovian bull, equipped for masculine use ; painting the power- 
ful, ramping stallion in his amorous pride ; not weakly nor meanly flinch- 



The Good Gray Poet. (1865-6). 115 

ing from the full celebration of what God has made. Woman, grand in 
art, will come creating in forms, however novel, the absolute, the permanent, 
the real, the evil and the good, as yEschylus, as Cervantes, as Shakespeare 
before her; with sex, with truth, witli universality, without omissions or 
concealments. And woman, as the ideal reader of literature, is not the 
indelicate prude, flushing and squealing over some frank page ; it is that 
high and beautiful soul, Marie de Gournay, devoutly absorbing the work of 
her master Montaigne, finding it all great, greatly comprehending, greatly 
accepting it all ; fronting its license and grossness without any of the livid 
shuddering of Puritans, and looking on the book in the same universal and 
kindly spirit as its author looked upon the world. Woman reading otherwise 
than thus — shrinking from Apulcius, from Rabelais, from Aristophanes, from 
Shakespeare, from even Wycherlcy, or Pctronius, or Aretin,or Shirley — is less 
than man, is not ideal, not strong, not nobly good, but petty, and effeminate, 
and mean. And not for her, nor by her, nor by man, do I assent to the ex- 
purgation of the great books. Literature cannot spring to a higher level than 
theirs. Alas! it has sprung to a lower. 

The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Absolute. To contain all, 
by containing the premise, the truth, the idea and feeling of all, to tally the 
universe by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, terror, 
beauty, service ; to be great to the utmost conceivability of greatness — what 
higher level than this can literature spring to? Up on the highest summit 
stand such works, never to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Their in- 
decency is not that of the vulgar; their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their 
evil, if it be evil, is not there for nothing — it serves; at the base of it is Love. 
Every poet of the highest quality is, in the masterly coinage of the author of 
Leaves of Grass, a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, full 
of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral indeed, but only as the 
world is moral. Shakespeare is all good", Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is 
all good, not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, 
but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention — a love 
which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible 
and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in 
which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlcgel has said, that makes it 
either an infamy or a virtue ; and the spirit of the great authors, no matter 
what their letter, is one with that which pervades the Creation. In mighty 
love, with implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil. Nature de- 
velops man; genius also, in mighty love, with implements of pain and 
pleasure, of good and evil, develops man ; no matter what the means, that is 
the end. 

Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the great poets ! The world, 
which is the poem of God, is full of indecent passages ! " Shall there be evil 
•' in a city and the Lord hath not done it ?" shouts Amos. " I form the light. 



ii6 Appendix to Part I. 

"aiul create ilaikness; I make peace, and create evil ; I, the Lonl, ilo all these 
" things," thunders Isaiah. " This," says Coleridge, " is the deep abyss of the 
•' mystery of God." Ay, and the profound of the mystery of genius also! 
Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of the economy of Deity. 
Gentle reviewers endeavor to find excuses for the freedoms of geniuses. " It 
is to prove that they were above conventionalities." " It is referable to the 
age." " The age permitted a degree of coarseness," etc. " Shakespeare's 
indecencies are the result of his age." Oh, Ossa on Pelion, mount piled 
on mount, of error and folly! Wliat has genius, spirit of the absolute and 
the eternal, to do with the detlnitions of position, or conventionalities, or 
tli£ age ? Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them 
into His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this is the 
general reason in all cases. They are here, because they are there. That is 
the eternal why. — No ; Aljjhonso of Castile thought that, if he had been con- 
sulted at the Creation, he could have given a few hints to the Almighty. Not 
I. I play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God. 

What is this poem, for the giving of which to America and the world, and 
for that alone, Its author has been dismissed with ignominy from a Government 
crtice ? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen 
of naive literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, 
a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil ; 
no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast 
carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future ; the strong and haughty 
psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of 
which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every 
other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I can- 
not even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar 
and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all oim" letters. Intellectually, we are still a de- 
pendency of Great Britain, and one word — colonial — eompreheiuls and stamps 
our literature. In no literary form, except our newspapers, has there been 
anything distinctively American. I note our best books — the works of Jef- 
ferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of Webster, Everett's 
rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, the writings of 
Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Ly- 
sander Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hil- 
dreth, Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's "•History of Spanish Literature," 
Judd's " Margaret," the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant 
poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip 
Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of Eilgar Poe, the wizard tales of Haw- 
thorne, Irving's " Knickerbocker," Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on 
Shakespeare, the polilical economy of Carey, the prison letters ami immortal 
speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloi^ucnce of Wendell Phillips, and 



The Good Gray Poet.{\%()^-G). 117 

those (liamonfls of the first water, the {^reat clear essays and greater poems of 
Emerson. This literature has often commandinir merits, and much of it is 
very precious to me ; but in respect to its national character, all that can be said 
is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with America; and the foreign model, 
the foreign standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all. 

At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of 
Grass the immense and absolute sunrise ! It is all our own ! The nation is 
in it ! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is 
distinctively and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, with- 
out reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life. 
Look at what it celebrates and contains ! hardly to be enumerated without 
sometimes using the powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissolu- 
ble are they with the things described. The essences, the events, the objects 
of America; the myriad varied landscapes; the teeming and giant cities; the 
generous and turbulent populations; the prairie solitudes, the vast pastoral 
plateaus; the Mississippi; the land dense with villages and farms; the habits, 
manners, customs ; the enormous diversity of temperatures ; the immense geog- 
raphy; the red aborigines passing away, " charging the water and the land 
with names;" the early settlements; the sudden uprising and defiance of the 
Revolution; the august figure of Washington; tlie formation and sacredness 
of the Constitution ; the pouring in of the emigrants; the million-masted har- 
bors; the general opulence and comfort; the fisheries, and whaling, and gold- 
digging, and manufactures, and agriculture; the dazzling movement of new 
States, rushing to be great; Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; 
the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky Mountains, thunder- 
ing and spreading; the Union impregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever 
tracked and assaulted; liberty deathless on these shores; the noble and free 
character of the people ; the equality of male and female ; the ardor, the 
fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enterprise, the affection, the cour- 
age, the love of music, the passion for personal freedom ; the mercy and jus- 
tice and compassion of the people; the popular faults and vices and crimes; 
the deference of the President to the private citizen ; the image of Christ for- 
ever deepening in the public mind as the brother of despised and rejected 
persons; the i)romise and wild song of the future; the vision of the Federal 
Mother, seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of her many chil- 
dren; the pouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of sjilendor, incessant 
and branching; the tremendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America — 
■with all these, with more, with everything transcendent, amazing, and new, 
undimmed by the pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of 
actual life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being unwinds in all its 
magnificent reality in these pages. To understand Greece, study the " Iliad" 
and " Odyssey ;" study Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her democ- 
racy is there. Would you have a text-book of democracy ? The writings of 



Il8 Appendix to Part I. 

JcfTerson are good; Dc Tociiuevillc is better; but tlic great poet always con- 
tains liislorian and pliilosoplior — and to know the comproliending spirit of tills 
country, you shall question these insulted pages. 

Yet this vast and patriotic celebration and presentation of all that is our 
own, is but a part of this tremendous volume. Herein addition is thrown in 
poetic form, a philosophy of life, rich, subtle, composite, ample, adequate to 
these great shores. Here are presented superb types of models of manly and 
womanly character for the future of this country, athletic, large, naive, free, 
dauntless, haughty, loving, nobly carnal, nobly spiritual, equal in body and 
soul, acceptive and tolerant as Nature, generous, cosmopolitan, above all, re- 
ligious. Here arc erected standards, drawn from the circumstances of our 
case, by which not merely our literature, but all our performance, our politics, 
art, behavior, love, conversation, dress, society, everything belonging to our 
lives and their conduct, will be shaped and recreated. A powerful alllatus 
from the Infinite has given this book life. A voice which is the manliest of 
human voices sounds through it all. In it is the strong spirit which will 
surely mould our future. Mark my words: its sentences will yet clinch the 
arguments of statesmen ; its precepts will be the laws of the people ! From 
the beams of this seminal sun will be generated, with tropical luxuriance, the 
myriad new forms of thought and life in America. And in view of the na- 
tional character and national purpose of this work — in view of its vigorous 
re-enforcement and service to all that we hold most ]irccious — I make the 
claim here, that so far from defaming and persecuting its author, the attitude 
of an American statesman or public officer towards him should be to the high- 
est degree friendly and sustaining. 

Beyond his country, too, this poet serves the world. He refutes by his ex- 
ample the saying of Goethe, one of those which stain that noble fame with 
baseness, that a great poet cannot be patriotic ; and he dilates to a universal 
use which redoubles the splendors of his volume, and makes it dear to all 
that is human. I am not its authorized interpreter, and can only state, at the 
risk of imperfect expression and perhaps error, what its meanings and pur- 
pose seem to me. But I see that, in his general intention, the author has 
aimed to express that most common but wondrous thing — that strange assem- 
blage of soul, body, intellect — beautiful, mystical, terrible, limited, boundless, 
ill-assorted, contradictory, yet singularly harmonized — a Human Being, a sin- 
gle, separate identity — a Man — himself; but himself typically, and in his uni- 
versal being. This he has done with perfect candor, including the bodily 
attributes and organs as necessary component parts of the creation. Every 
thinking ]')erson should see the value and use of such a presentation of human 
nature as this. I also see — antl it is from these parts of the book that much 
of the misunderstanding and otTence arises — that this poet seeks in subtle ways 
to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and debauchees, to which it has 
been abandoned, and to redeem to noble thought and use, the great element 



The Good Gray Poet.{\%Ci^-()). 1 19 

of amativcness or sexuality, with all its acts and organs. Sometimes by direct 
asscrtirtn, sometimes by implication, lie rejects tlie prevailing admission that 
this element is vile; declares its natural or normal manifestation to be sacred 
and unworthy shame; awards it an equal but not superior sanctity with the 
other elements that compose man; and illustrates his doctrine and sets his ex- 
ample by applying this element, with all that pertains to it, to use as jjart of 
the imagery of poetry. Then, besides, diffused like an atmosphere through- 
out the poem, tincturing all its quality, and giving it that sacerdotal and pro- 
phetic character which makes it a sort of American Bible, is the pronounced 
and ever-recurring assertion of the divinity of all things. In a sjiirit like that 
of the Egyptian ])riesthood, who wore the dung-beetle in gold on their crests, 
perhaps as a symbol of the sacrednessof even the lowest forms of life, the poet 
celebrates all the Creation as noble and holy — the meanest and lowest parts 
of it, as well as the most lofty; all equally projections of the Infinite; all 
emanations of the creative life of God. Perpetual hymns break from him in 
praise of the divineness of the universe ; he sees a halo around every shape, 
however low ; and life in all its forms inspires a rapture of worship. 

How some persons can think a book of this sort bad, is clearer to me than 
it used to be. Swedenborg says that to the devils, perfumes are stinks. I 
happen to know that some of the vilest abuse Leaves of Grass has received, 
has come from men of the lowest possible moral life. It is not so easy to un- 
derstand how some persons of culture and judgment can fail to perceive its 
literary greatness. Making fair allowance for faults, which no great work, 
from " Ilamlet" to the world itself, is perhaps without, the book, in form as 
in substance, seems to me a masterpiece. Never in literature has there been 
more absolute conccptive or presentative power. The forms and shows of 
things are bodied forth so that one may say they become visible, and are alive. 
Here, in its grandest, freest use, is the English language, from its lowest 
compass to the top of the key; from the powerful, rank idiom of the streets 
and fields to the last subtlety of academic speech — ami)le, various, telling, 
luxuriant, pictorial, final, conquering; absorbing from other languages to its 
own purposes their choicest terms; its rich and daring composite defying 
grammar; its most incontestable and splendid trium|jhs achieved, as Jefferson 
notes of the superb Latin of Tacitus, in haughty scorn of the rules of gram- 
marians. Another singular excellence is the metre — entirely novel, free, flex- 
ible, melodious, corresponsive to the thought; its noble proportions and ca- 
dences reminding of winds and waves, and the vast elemental sounds and 
motions of Nature, and having an equal variety and liberty. I have heard 
this brought into disparaging comparison with the metres of Tennyson; the 
poetry also disparaged in the same connection. I hardly know what to think 
of people who can talk in this way. To say nothing of the preference, the 
mere parallel is only less ludicrous and arbitrary than would be one between 
Moore and Isaiah. Tennyson is an exquisite and sumptuous poet of the third, 



I20 Appendix to Pari I. 

perhaps the fourth order, as certainly below Milton and Virgil as Milton 
and Virgil are certainly below .^schylus and Honaer. His full-fluted ver- 
bal music, which is one of his chief merits, is of an extraordinary beauty. 
But in this respect the comparison between him and Walt Whitman is that 
between melody and harmony — between a song by Franz Abt or Schubert 
and a symphony by Beethoven. Speaking generally, and not with exact 
justice to either, the words of Tennyson, irrespective of their sense, make 
music to the ear, while the sense of Walt Whitman's words makes a loftier 
music in the mind. For a music, perfect and vast, subtle and more than auric- 
ular — woven not alone from the verbal sounds and rhythmic cadences, but 
educed by the thought and feeling of the verse from the reader's soul by the 
power of a spell few hold — I know of nothing superior to " By the Bivouac's 
fitful flame," the " Ashes of Soldiers," the " Spirit whose Work is done," the 
prelude to " Drum Taps," that most mournful and noble of all love songs, 
•Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd," or "Outofthe Cradle endlessly Rock- 
ing," " Elemental Drifts," the entire section entitled " Song of Myself," 
the hymn commencing " Splendor of Falling Day," or the great salute 
to the French Revolution of '93, entitled " France." If these are not ex- 
amples of great structural harmony as well as of the highest poetry, there are 
none in literature. And if all these were wanting, there is a poem in the vol- 
ume which, if the author had never written another line, would be sufficient 
to place him among the chief poets of the world. I do not refer to " Chant- 
ing the Square Deific," though that also would be sufficient, in its incompara- 
ble breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish the high- 
est poetic reputation, but to the strain commemorating the death of the be- 
loved President, commencing " When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed," 
a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture of tender religious passion, 
spreading aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and solitary in literature, and 
will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of Death forever. Emperors 
might well elect to die, could their memories be surrounded with such a re- 
quiem, which, next to the grief and love of the people, is the grandest and 
the only grand funeral music poured around Lincoln's bier. 

In the face of works like these, testimony of the presence on earth of a 
mighty soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone of the current criticism. 
Even from eminent persons, who ought to know how to measure literature, 
and who are friendly to this author, I hear, mingled with inadequate praises, 
the self-same censures — the very epithets even which Voltaire not more 
ridiculously passed on Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen ! What you, like 
Voltaire, take for rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, may be the sacred 
and magnificent wildness of a virgin world of poetry, all unlike these fine 
and ordered Tennysonian rose-gardens which are your ideal, but excelling 
these as the globe excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived. I 
see how swiftly the smart, bright conventional standards of modern criticism 



TJie Good Gray Poet. (1865 -'6). 121 

would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of abortions. I see of how lim- 
ited worth are the wit and scholarship of these "Saturday Reviews" and 
"London Examiners," with their doppelgangers on this side of the Atlantic, 
by the treatment some poetic masterpiece of China or Hindustan receives 
when it falls into their hands for judgment. Anything not cast in modern 
conventional forms, any novel or amazing beauty, strikes them as comic. 
Read Mr. Buckley's notes, even at this late day, on a poet so incredibly great 
as ^^schylus. Read an yEschylus illustrated by reference to Nicholas Nickle- 
by, Mrs. Bombazine, and Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocular or 
flippant annotations — this, too, by an Oxford scholar of rank and merit. No 
wonder Leaves of Grass goes underrated or unperceived. Modern criticism 
is Voltaire estimating the Apocalypse as " dirt," and roaring with laughter 
over the leaves of Ezekiel. Why ? Because this poetry has not the court 
tread, the perfume, the royal purple of Racine — only its own wild and form- 
less incomparable sublimity. Voltaire was an immense and noble person; 
only it was not part of his greatness to be able to see that other greatness 
which transcends common sense as the Infinite transcends the Finite. These 
children of Voltaire, also, who make the choirs of modern criticism, have 
great merits. But to justly estimate poetry of the first order is not one of 
them. "Shakespeare's 'Tempest' or 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' or any 
" such damned nonsense as that," said one of this school to me a month aero. 
" Look at that perpendicular grocery sign-board, tlie letters all fantastic and 
reading from top to bottom, a mere oddity: that is Leaves of Grass,'' said an- 
other, a person of eminence. No, gentlemen ! you and I differ. I see, very 
clearly, the nature of a work like this, the warmest praise of which, not to 
mention your blame, has been meagre and insufficient to the last degree, and 
which centuries must ponder before they can sufficiently honor. You have 
had your say ; let me have at least the beginning of mine : Nothing that 
America had before in literature rose above construction; this is a creation. 
Idle, and worse than idle, is any attempt to place this author either among or 
below the poets of the day. They are but singers; he is a bard. In him 
you have one of that mighty brotherhood who, more than statesmen, mould 
the future; who, as Fletcher of Saltoun said, when they make the songs of a 
nation, it matters not who makes the laws. I class him boldly, and the future 
will confirm my judgment, among the great creative minds of the world. By 
a quality almost incommunicable, which makes its possessor, no matter what 
his diversity or imperfections, equal with the Supremes of art, and by the very 
structure of his mind, he belongs there. His place is beside Shakespeare, 
^schylus, Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Isaiah — the bards of the last ascent, the 
brothers of the radiant summit. And if any man think this estimate extrav- 
agant, I leave him, as Lord Bacon says, to the gravity of that judgment, and 
pass on. Enough for me to pronounce this book grandly good and supremely 
great. Clamor, on the score of its morality, is nothing but a form of turpi- 



123 Appoidi.x to PiUt I. 

tude; denial of its greatness is nothing but an insanity; and the roar of 
Sodom and tlie laughter of IJedlam shall not, by a iiair's breadtli, swerve my 
verdict. 

As for those jxissages wliich liave been so strangely interpreted, I have to 
say that nothing but the horrible inanity of prudery, to which civilization has 
become subject, and which atVects even many good persons, could cloud and 
distort their palpable innocence and nobleness. What chance has an author 
to a reasonable interpretation of such utterances in an age when squeamish- 
ness, the Siamese twin-brother of indelicacy, is throned as the censor of all 
life ? Look at the nearest, the commonest, and homeliest evidences of the 
abysm into which we have fallen. Here in my knowledge is an estimable 
family which, when the baby playing cvji the tloor kicked up its skirts, 1 have 
repeatedly seen rush en masse to pull down the immodest petticoat. Here is 
a lady whose shame of her body is such tliat she will not disrobe in tlie pres- 
ence of one of her own sex, and thinks it horrible to sleep at night witiiout 
being swaddled in half her garments. Everywhere you see women perpetually 
glancing to be sure their skirts are quite down ; twisting their heads over their 
shoulders, like some of the damned in Dante, to get a rear view; drawing in 
their feet if so much as a toe happens to protrude beyond the hem of the 
gown, and in various ways betraying a morbid consciousness which is more 
offensive than positive immodesty. When I went to the hospital, I saw one 
of those pretty and good girls, who in muslin and ribbons ornament the wards, 
and are called " nurses," pick up her skirts and skurry away, Hushing hectic, 
•with averted face, because as she passed a cot the poor fellow who lay there 
happened, in his uneasy turnings, to thrust part of a manly leg from beneath 
the coverlet. I once heaid Enierson severely censured in a private company, 
five or six pereons present, and I the only dissenting voice, bcc.uiso in one of 
his essays he had used the word "spermatic." When Tennyson publi>hed 
the " Idyls of the King," some of the journals in both America and England, 
and several persons in my own hearing, censured the weird and magniliceut 
•'Vivien," one of his finest poems, as "immoral" and "vulgar." When 
Charles Sumner, in the debate on Louisiana, characterized the new-lormeil 
State as " a seven months' child, begotten by the bayonet, in criminal conjunc- 
tion with the spirit of caste" — a stroke of absolute genius — lie was censured 
by the public prints, and reminded that therp were ladies in the gallery 1 
Lately the " London Observer," one of the most eminent of the British jour- 
nals, in a long and labored editorial on the bathing at Margate, denounced 
the British wives and matrons in the severest terms for sitting on the beach 
when men were bathing in "slight bathing-dresses" (it was not even pre- 
tended that the men were nude) — and even went the length of demanding 
of the civil authorities that they sliould invoke the interference of Parlia- 
ment to stop this scandal I Thesfi are fair minor specimens of the prudery, 
worse than vice, but also the concomitant of tiie most shocking vice, which 



The Good Gray Poet. (1865-6). 123 

prevails everywhere. Its travesty is the dressing in pantalettes the " limbs " 
of the piano; its insolent tragicomedy is the expulsion of Shakespeare from 
office because he writes " indecent passages " ; its tragedy is the myriad results 
of wrong, and crime, and ruin, carried fnto all the details of every relation 
of life. 

A civilization in which such things as I have mentioned can be thought or 
done is guilty to the core. It is not purity, it is impurity, which calls clothes 
more decent than the naked body — thus inanely conferring upon the work of 
the tailor or milliner a modesty denied to the work of God. It is not inno- 
cent but guilty thought which attaches shame, secrecy, baseness, and horror 
to great and august parts and functions of humanity. The tacit admission 
everywhere prevalent that portions of the human physiology are base ; that 
the amative feelings and acts of the sexes, even when hallowed by marriage, 
are connected with a low sensuality; and that these, with such subjects or occur- 
rences as the conception and birth of children, are to be absconded from, 
blushed at, concealed, ignored, withheld from education, and in every way 
treated as if they belonged to the category of sins agaiast Nature, is not only 
in itself a contemptible insanity, but a main source of unspeakable personal 
and social evil. From the morbid state of mind which such a theory and 
practice must induce are spawned a thousand guilty actions of every de- 
scription and degree. There is no occurrence in the vast and diversified 
range of sexual evil, from the first lewd thought in the mind of the budding 
child, the very suspicion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the 
last ghastly and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless victim in some 
suburban woodland, that is not fed mainly from this mystery and mother of 
abominations, to whose care civilization has remitted the entire subject. 
The poet who, in the spirit of that divine utility which marked the first 
great bards and will mark the last, seeks to make literature remediate to an 
estate like this, works in the best interests of his country and his fellow- 
beings, and deserves their gratitude. This is what Walt Whitman has done. 
Directly and indirectly, in forms as various as the minds he seeks to influence ; 
in frank opposition to the great sexual falsehood by which we are ruled and 
ruined, he has thrown into civilization a conception intended to be slowly and 
insensibly absorbed, and to ultimately appear in results of good — the concep- 
tion of the individual as a divine democracy of essences, powers, attributes, 
functions, organs — all equal, all sacred, all consecrate to noble use ; the sexual 
part the same as the rest, no more a subject for mystery, or shame, or secrecy, 
than the intellectual, or the manual, or the alimentary, or the locomotive part 
— divinely commonplace as head, or hand, or stomach, or foot ; and, though 
sacred, to be regarded as so ordinary that it shall be employed the same as 
any other part, for the purposes of literature — an idea which he exemplifies in 
his poetry by a metaphorical use which it is a deep disgrace to any intellect to 
misunderstand. This is his lesson. This is one of the central ideas which 



124 Appendix to Part I. 

rule the myriad teeming play of his vohime, and interpret it as a law of Nature 
interprets the complex play of facts which proceeds Iroiu it. This, then, is not 
license, but thought. It may be erroneous, it may be chimerical, it may be 
ineffectual; but it is thought, serious and solemn thouglit, on a most diflicult 
and deeply immersed question — thought emanating from the deep source of 
a great love and care for men, and seeking nothing but a pure human welfare. 
When, therefore, any persons undertake to outrage and injure its author for 
having given it to the world, it is not merely as the pigmy incarnations of the 
depraved modesty, the surface morality, the filthy and libidinous decency of 
the age, but it is as the persecutors of thought that they stand before us. It is no 
excuse for them to say, that such treatment of Walt Whitman is justifiable, 
because his book appears to them bad. Waiving every other consideration, I 
have to inform them that on this subject they should not permit themselves 
the immodesty of a judgment. It is not for such as they to attempt to prison 
in the poor cell of their t)pinion the vast journey and illumination of the human 
mind. No matter what the book seems to them, they should remember that 
an author deserves to be tried by his peers, and that a book may easily seem 
to some persons quite another thing from what it really is to others. 

Here is Rabelais, a writer who wears all the crowns; but even Mr. Harlan 
would consider Walt Whitman white as purity beside him. " Filth," " zany- 
ism," "grossness," "profligacy," "licentiousness," "sensuality," "beastli- 
ness" — these are samples of the epithets which have fallen, like a rain of ex- 
crement, on Rabelais for three hundred years. And yet it is of him that the 
holy-hearted Coleridge — an authority of the first order on all purely literary 
or ethical questions — it is of him that Coleridge says, and says justly : " I 
" could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work 
" which would make the Church stare, and the Conventicle groan, and yet 
" would be the truth, and nothing but the truth." The moral elevation of 
Rabelais ! A great criticism, a needed word. It is just. No matter for 
seeming — Rabelais is good to the very core. Rabelais' book, viewed with 
reference to ensemble, viewed in relation, viewed in its own proper quality 
by other than cockney stanilards, is righteous to the uttermost extreme. So 
is the work of Walt NVhitman, far other in character, and far less obnoxious 
to criticism than that of Rabelais, but which demands at least as liberal a 
judgment, and which it is not for any deputy, however high in ofillce, to assign 
to shame. 

I know not what further vicissitude of insult and outrage is in store for this 
great man. It may be that the devotees of a castrated literature, the earth- 
worms that call themselves authors, the confectioners that pass for poets, the 
flies that are recognized as critics, the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and 
the fools, are more potent than I dream to mar the fortunes of his earthly 
hours ; but above and beyond them uprises a more majestic civilization in the 



Tlic Good Gray Poet. (i865-'6). 125 

immense and sane serenities of futurity; and the man who has achieved ihat 
sublime thing, a genuine book ; who has written to make his land greater, 
her citizens Ijetter, his race nobler; who has striven to serve men by com- 
municating to them that wiiich they least know, their own nature, their own 
experience; who has thrown into living verse a philosopliy designed to exalt 
life to a higher level of sincerity, reality, religion ; who has torn away dis- 
guises and illusions, and restored to commonest things, and the simplest and 
roughest people, their divine significance and natural, antique dignity, and 
who has wrapped his country and all created things as with splendors of sun- 
rise, in the beams of a powerful and gorgeous poetry — that man, whatever be 
the clouds that close around his fame, is assured illustrious; and when every 
face lowers, when every hand is raised against him, turning his back upon his 
day and generation, he may write upon his book, with all the pride and grief 
of the calumniated /Eschylus, the haughty dedication that poet graved upon 
his hundred dramas: To TiMli! 

And Time will remember him. lie holds upon the future this supreme 
claim of all high poets — behind the book, a life loyal to humanity. Never, 
if I can help it, shall be forgotten those immense and divine labors in the 
hospitals of Washington, among the wounded of the war, to which he volun- 
tarily devoted himself, as the best service he could render to his struggling 
country, and which illustrate that boundless love which is at once the domi- 
nant element of his character, and the central source of his genius. How can 
I tell the nature and extent of that sublime ministration ? During those years, 
Washington was a city in whose unbuilt places and around whose borders 
were thickly planted dense white clusters of barracks. These were the hos- 
pitals — neat, orderly, rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay 
drained with sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in 
rows of cots on either side, were stretched, in all attitudes and aspects of 
mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted anguish, of death, the martyrs of the 
war ; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the little chil- 
dren in many a dwelling mournful for those fathers, the worn and anxious 
wives, haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls weeping their spirits 
from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who from afar yearned to the 
bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman, in the spirit of Christ, soothing, 
healing, consoling, restoring, night and day, for years; never failing, never 
tiring, constant, vigilant, faithful; performing, without fee or reward, his self- 
imposed duty; giving to the task all his time and means, and doing every- 
thing that it is possible for one unaided human being to do. Others fail, 
others flag; good souls that came often and did their best, yield and drop 
away ; he remains. Winter and summer, night and day, every day in the 
week, every week in the year, all the time, till the winter of '65, when for a 
few hours daily, during six months, his duties to the Government detain 
him ; after that, all the time he can spare, he vibits the hospitals. What does 



126 Appendix to Fart I. 

he do ? See. At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, in '62-'3, he is in a 
hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock ; it is a large, brick house, full 
of wounded and dying ; in front, at the foot of a tree, is a cart-load of ampu- 
tated legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers ; dead bodies shrouded in army blankets 
are near; there are fresh graves in the yard; he is at work in the house 
amang the officers and men, lying, unclean and bloody, in their old clothes; 
he is upstairs and down; he is poor, he has nothing to give this time, but he 
writes letters for the wounded ; he cheers up the desponding ; he gives love. 
Some of the men, war-sad, passionately cling to him; they weep; he will sit 
for hours with them if it gives them comfort. Here he is in Washington, 
after Chancellorsville, at night, on the wharf; two boatloads of wounded 
(and oh, such wounded!) have been landed; they lie scattered about on the 
landing, in the rain, drenched, livid, lying on the ground, on old quilts, on 
blankets; their heads, their limbs bound in bloody rags; a few torches light 
the scene ; the ambulances, the callous drivers are here ; groans, sometimes 
a scream, resound through the flickering light and the darkness. He is there, 
moving around ; he soothes, he comforts, he consoles, he assists to lift the 
wounded into the ambulances; he helps to place the worst cases on the 
stretchers ; his kiss is warm upon the pallid lips of some who are mere 
children ; his tears drop upon the faces of the dying. Here he is in the 
hospitals of Washington — the Campbell, the Patent Office, the Eighth Street, 
the Judiciary, the Carver, the Douglas, the Armory Square. He writes 
letters; he writes to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts; some of 
the soldiers are poor penmen; some cannot get paper and envelopes; some 
fear to write lest they should worry the folks at home; he writes for them all; 
he uses that genius which shall endure to the latest generation, to say the 
felicitous, the consoling, the cheering, the prudent, the best word. He goes 
through the wards, he talks cheerfully, he distributes amusing reading matter; 
at night or by day, when the horrible monotony of the hospital weighs like 
lead on every soul, he reads to the men ; he is careful to sit away from the cot 
of any poor fellow so sick or wounded as to be easily disturbed, but he gathers 
into a large group as many as he can, and amuses them with some story or 
enlivening game, like that of " Twenty Questions," or recites some little poem 
or speech, or starts some discussion, or with some device dispels the gloom. 
For his daily occupation, he goes from ward to ward, doing all he can to 
hearten and revive the spirits of the sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of 
their recovery. Usually, his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped across his 
shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small gifts; his theory is that these men, 
far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need more than anything some practical 
token that they are not forsaken, that some one feels a fatherly or brotherly 
interest in them; hence, he gives them what he can; to particular cases, 
entirely penniless, he distributes small sums of money, fifteen cents, twenty 
cents, thirty cents, fifty cents, not much to each, for there are many, but under 



TJlc Good Gray Poet. (1865-6). 127 

the circumstances these little sums are and mean a great deal. He also dis- 
tributes and directs envelopes, gives letter paper, postage stamps, toliacco, 
apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries ; gets delicate food for 
special cases; sometimes a disli of oysters or a dainty piece of meat, or some 
savory morsel for some poor creature who loathes the hospital fare, but whose 
appetite may be tempted. In the hot weather he buys boxes of oranges and 
distributes them, grateful to lips baked with fever; he buys boxes of lemons, 
he buys sugar, to make lemonade for those parched throats of sick soldiers; 
he buys canned peaches, strawberries, pears; he buys ice cream and treats 
the whole hospital ; he buys whatever luxuries his limited resources will allow, 
and he makes them go as far as he can. Where does he get the means for 
this expenditure? For Walt Whitman is poor; he is poor, and has a right 
to be proud of his poverty, for it is the sacred, the ancient, the immemorial 
poverty of goodness and genius. He gels the means by writing for news- 
papers; he expends all he gets upon his boys, his darlings, the sick and 
maimed soldiers — the young heroes of tlie land who saved their country, the 
laborers of America who fought for the hopes of the world. He adds to his 
own earnings the contributions of noble souls, often strangers, who, in Boston, 
in New York, in Providence, in Brooklyn, in Salem, in Washington and else- 
where, have heard that such a man walks the hospitals, and who volunteer to 
send him this assistance ; when at last he gets a place under Government, and 
till Mr. Harlan turns him out, he has a salary which he spends in the same 
way ; sometimes his wrung heart gets the better of his prudence, and he spends 
till he himself is in difficulties. He gives all his money, he gives all his time, 
he gives all his love. To every inmate of tlie hospital something, if only a 
vital word, a cheering touch, a caress, a trifling gift; but always in his rounds 
he selects the special cases, the sorely wounded, the deeply despondent, the 
homesick, the dying; to these he devotes himself; he buoys them up with 
fond words, with caresses, with personal affection ; he bends over them, strong, 
clean, cheerful, perfumed, loving, and his magnetic touch and love sustain 
them. He does not shrink from the smell of their sickening gangrene ; he 
does not flinch from their bloody and rotten mutilations; he draws nigher for 
all that; he sticks closer; he dresses those wounds; he fans those burning 
temples ; he moistens those parched lips; he washes tliose wasted bodies; he 
watches often and often in the dim ward by the sufferer's cot all night long ; he 
reads from the New Testament, the words sweeter than music to the sinking 
soul ; he soothes with prayer the bedside of the dying; he sits, mournful and 
loving, by the wasted dead. How can I tell the story of his labors? How 
can I describe the scenes among which he moved with such endurance and 
devotion, watched by me, for years? 

Few know the spectacle presented by those grim wards. It was hideous. 
I have been there at night when it seemed that I should die with sympathy if 
I stayed; — when the horrible attitudes of anguish, the horizontal shapes of 



128 Appendix to Part I. 

cndnvcr on the white cots, the quiet sleepers, the excruciated emaciations of men, 
the hlooily handages, the snioU of iiUisteicd sores, the dim h\niplij;ht, tlie king 
white ward, the groans of some patient half hidden bchiiul a screen, naked, 
shorn of both arms, hehl by the assistant upon a stool, made up a scene whose 
well-compounded horror is unspeakable. Now realize a man witluuit worKily 
inducement, without reward, from love and compassion only, giving up his 
life to scenes like these; foregoing pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers 
of torture, among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, the forms upon 
which shell and rifle and sabre had wrought every bizarre atrocity of mutila- 
tion; immuring himself in tlie air of their sighs, their moans, the mutter and 
scream of their delirium ; breathing the stench of their putrid wounds ; taking 
up his part and lot with them, living a life of ]irivation and denial, and hoard- 
ing his scanty means for the relief and mitigation of their anguish. That 
man is Walt Whitman! I said his labors have been immense. The word is 
well chosen. 1 sj^eak within bounds wlien I say that, during those years, he 
has been in contact w itii, ami, in one form or another, either in hospital or on 
the held, personally ministered to upward of one hundred thousand sick and 
wounded men. You mothers of America, these were your sons! Faithfully, 
and with a mother's love, he tended them for you ! Many and many a life 
has he saved — many a time has he felt his heart grow great with that delicious 
triumph — many a home owes its best beloved to him. Sick and wounded, 
officers and privates, the black soldiers as well as the white, the teamsters, the 
poor creatures in the contraband camps, the rebel the same as the lo) al — he 
dill his best for them all; they were all sulTerers, they were all men. — Let him 
pass. I note Thoreau's saying, that he suggests something more than human. 
It is true. I see it in his book and in his life. To that something more than 
lunuan which is also in all men — to the hour of judgment, to the hour of 
sanity, let me resign him. Not for such as I to vindicate such as he. Not 
for him, perhaps, the recognition of his day and generation. But a life and 
deeds like his, lightly esteemed by men, sink deep into the memory of Man. 
Great is the stormy fight of Zutphen; it is the young lion of English Prot- 
estantism springing in haughty fury for the defence of the Netherlands from 
the bloody ravin of Spain ; but Philip Sidney passing the llask of water from 
his own lips lo tiie dying soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the foregrc.uiid 
of its noble purpose and martial rage; and whatever be the verdict of tlie 
yresent, sure am I that hereafter and to the latest ages, when Bull Run and 
Shiloh and Port Hudson, when Vicksburg and Stone River and Fort Donel- 
son, when Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and the Wilder- 
ness, and the great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and Richmond rolled in 
flame, and all the battles for the life of the Republic against her last internal 
foe are gathered up in accumulated terraces of struggle upon the mountain 
of history, well- relieved against those bright and bloody tumultuous giant 
tableaux, ami all the ilust and thunder of a noble war, the men and women 



The Good Gray Poet. (1865 -'6). 129 

of America will love to gaze upon the stalwart form of the good gray poet, 
bending to heal the hurts of their wounded and soothe the souls of their dy- 
ing, and the deep and simjile words of the last great martyr will be theirs, — 
" Well, he looks like A man." 

So let me leave him. And if there be any who think this tribute in bad 
taste, even to a poet so great, a person so unusual, a man so heroic and lov- 
ing, I answer, that when, on grounds of taste, foes withhold detraction, friends 
may withhold eulogy; and that at any rate I recognize no reason f(jr keeping 
back just words of love and reverence when, as in this case, they must glow 
upon the sullen foil of the printed hatreds of years. To that long record of 
hostility, I am only proud to be able to oppose this record of affection. And 
with respect to the crowning enmity of the Secretary of the Interior, let no 
person misjudge the motives upon which I denounce it. Personally, apart 
from this act, I have nothing against Mr. Harlan. He is of my own party; 
and my politics have been from my youth essentially the same as his own. I do 
not know him ; I have never even seen him; I criticise no attitude nor action 
of his life but this; and I criticise this with as little personality as I can give 
to an action so personal. I withhold, too, as far as I can, every expression 
of resentment; and no one who knew all I know of this matter could fail to 
credit me with singular and great moderation. For, behind what I have re- 
lated, there is another history, every incident of which I have recovered from 
the obscurity to which it was confided; and, as I think of it, it is with diffi- 
culty that I restrain my just indignation. Instead of my comparatively cold 
and sober treatment, this transaction deserves rather the pitiless exposure, the 
measureless, stern anger, the red-hot steel scourge of Juvenal. But I leave un- 
told its darkest details, and, waiving every other consideration, I rest solely and 
squarely on the general indignity and injury this action offers to intellectual 
liberty. I claim that to expel an author from a public office and subject him 
to public contumely, solely because he has published a book which no one 
can declare immoral without declaring all the grand books immoral, is to affix 
a penalty to thought, and to ob'-truct the freedom of letters. I declare this 
act the audacious captain of a series of acts, and a style of opinions whose 
tendency and effect throughout Christendom is to dwarf and degrade litera- 
ture, and to make great books impossible, except under paias of martyrdom. 
As such, I arraign it before every liberal and thoughtful mind. I denounce 
it as a sinister precedent; as a ban upon the free action of genius; as a logi- 
cal insult to all-commanding literature ; and as in every way a most serious 
and heinous wrong. Difference of opinion there may and must be upon the 
topics which in these pages I have grouped around it, but upon the act itself 
there can be none. As I drag it up here into the sight of the world, I call 
upon every scholar, every man of letters, every editor, every good fellow 
everywhere who wields the pen, to make common cause with me in rousing 
upon it the full tempest of reprobation it deserves. I remember Tennyson, 



130 Appendix to Part I. 

a spirit of vengeance over the desecrated grave of Moore ; T think of Scott 
rolling back the tide of obloquy from Hyron; I see Addison gilding the 
blackening fame of Swift; I mark Southampton befriending Shakespeare ; I 
recall Du Bellay enshielding Rabehiis ; I behold Hutten fortressing Luther ; 
here is Boccaccio lifting the darkness from Dante, and scattering flame on his 
foes in Florence; this is Bembo protecting Pomponatius; that is Grostete 
enfolding Roger Bacon from the monkish fury; there, covered with light, is 
Aristophanes defending .fcchylus; and if tliere lives aught of that old chiv- 
alry of letters, which in all ages has sprung to the succor and defence of 
genius, I summon it to act the part of honor and duty upon a wrong which, 
done to a single member of the great confraternity of literature, is done to 
all, and which flings insult and menace upon every immortal page that dares 
transcend the wicked heart or the constricted brain. God grant .that not in 
vain upon this outrage do I invoke the judgment of the mighty spirit of lite- 
rature, and the fires of every honest heart ! 

William Douglas O'Connor. 



TWO SUBSEQUEXT LETTERS. 

A NOTEWORTHY incident following the publication of Mr. O'Connor's pam- 
phlet is embodied in the subjoined correspondence. The defence of the poet 
appears to have been received by the literary journals of the United States 
with a complete unanimity of abuse and ridicule. Among these reviews was 
one in the New York " Round Table" of January 20th, 1S66, penned by a 
minor poet, of considerable distinction in New York literary circles, Mr. 
Richard Henry Stoddard. His article, written in a vein of flippant inso- 
lence and containing a number of insulting references to Mr. O'Connor's pre- 
vious literary work, was nevertheless relieved by the admission, however 
carelessly made, that Mr. Harlan '• deserved and deserves to be pilloried in 
the contempt of thinking men for this wanton insult to literature in the person 
of Mr. Whitman." This remark, imbedded in a column of rude persiflage, 
like a filament of gold in an acre of sage and alkeli, was the only observation 
adverse to Mr. Harlan's act which appeared in any American literary journal, 
and appears to have suggested the necessity for tlie following curiously clumsy 
and lying parry, made a week later (January 27th) in the " Round Table" by 
Mr. Charles Lanman, a gentleman of considerable literary pretensions, the 
author of the " Biographical Dictionary of Congress," formerly, it is said, 
secretary to Daniel Webster, and at this time one of the officers of the Inte- 
rior Department under Mr. Harlan. The line of defence chosen for 
the Secretary by one of his officers and friends is so extraordinary as to add a 



Tivo Subsequent Letters. 13 1 

new feature of outrafre to an already sufficiently scandalous transaction. Mr. 
Lanman's communication was as follows : 

Washington, January 19th, 1866. 
To THE Editor of the " Round Table." 

Sir: Your notice of "The Good Gray Poet" contains one important error 
that I desire, as a friend of Secretary Harlan, to correct. You intimate, or, 
rather, reiterate the charge of Mr. Walt Whitman's defender — that the author 
of Leaves of Grass was removed from a clerkship because of his religious 
opinions. To this statement I give the most positive denial ; and to substan- 
tiate it I have only to mention the fact that there are employed in the Interior 
Dci)artment gentlemen of every possible shade of religious opinion. Although 
the lion. Secretary is a high-minded and Christian gentleman, he has never, in 
a single instance, questioned an employe in regard to his religious belief, and 
for the very good reason that with those beliefs he has nothing to do. 
Nor is he in the habit of removing subordinates from office for their political 
opinions. Drunkards and incompetent men he does not consider fit to be 
intrusted with the business of the nation, and when such men are reported to 
him, they are very likely to be discharged. For removing Mr. Whitman 
from a clerkship there were two satisfactory reasons: he was wholly unfit to 
perform the duties which were assigned to his desk; and a volume which he 
published and caused to be circulated through the public offices was so coarse, 
indecent, and corrupting in its thought and language, as to jeopardize the 
reputation of the Department. 

Respectfully yours, 

Charles Lanman. 

To this indescribable document Mr. O'Connor replied in the " Round 
Table " of a week later (P'ebruary 3d) as follows : 

Washington, January 26th, 1866. 
To THE Editor of the "Round Table." 

Sir : Allow me a few words of reply to Mr. Charles Lanman's extraordi- 
nary letter in your last issue respecting the accusation brought against Mr. 
Harlan by my pamphlet, " The Good Gray Poet." 

As the statements of that letter are unfounded in every particular, they are 
probably as unauthorized as they are gratuitous. Nobody ever charged that 
Mr. Whitman was removed by the Secretary of the Interior "because of his 
religious opinions." I certainly made no such charge, nor did your reviewer. 

Mr. Lanman's other assertions are equally hardy. It is not true that Mr. 
Whitman was removed because " he was wholly unfit to perform the duties 
which were assigned to his desk." On the contrary, Mr. Ilarian himself said 
at tiie time of the dismissal that he had no fault to find with Mr. Whitman in 



132 Appendix to Pari I. 

regard to the performance of his official duties, but that he was discharjjed 
solely and only for being the author of Leaves of Grass. Nor is it true that 
Mr. Whitman was removed because he published and circulated in the Depart- 
ment any volume whatever. Leaves of Grass w as published years ago, and 
has been for some time out of print. " Drum-Taps," Mr. Whitman's recent 
book, consists mainly of poems of the war, and does not contain one word 
that even Mr. Harlan could accuse. 

This disposes of Mr. Lannian's statements. But I note the color he gives 
his letter by the insinuated word " drunkards," and whenever he has the 
courage to put that as a charge which he has only ventured to put as an 
innuendo, I may deal with it and him. 

The facts are precisely as I have stated them in my pamphlet, and whatever 
rejoinder any volunteer may choose to hazard, those facts ^Ir. Harlan himself 
ivill ne-t'er deny. 

You will, perhaps, permit me this opportunity to express my obligations to 
your reviewer. In his notice of my pamphlet he says that the Secretary of 
the Interior " deserved and deserves to be pilloried in the contempt of think- 
ing men for this wanton insult to literature in the person of Mr. Whitman." 
I thank him for those words. Coupled with such a condemnation of the out- 
rage I denounce, no affront, no ridicule heaped on me or my writings can 
excite in my mind any feeling unmixed with gratitude. Shaftesbury, in Eng- 
land, is, if report says truly, a bigot peer, and Walter Savage Landor wrote 
poems which almost rivalled the license of the Roman ; but if ever tiie lord, 
as the head of a Department, had dismissed the poet from an official station 
for his verses, the British press, whatever it thought of the poetry, would have 
stirred from John o' Groat's to Land's End with a tumult of denunciation 
whose impulse would have swept over the continent. I want a similar spirit 
here; and it matters very little what is said of my compositions, if the press 
and people of this country, by their resentment at an attempt to impose checks 
and penalties on intellectual liberty and the freedom of letters, and by their 
rebuke of a gross violation of the proprieties of the administration of a great 
Department, show that they are not below the decent level of Europe. 

Very resjiectfully, 

W. D. O'Connor. 



PART II. 

HISTORY OF LEAVES OF GRASS. 
ANALYSIS OF THE POEMS. 
ANALYSIS CONTINUED. 
APPENDIX TO PART H. 



( 133) 



When the true poet comes, liow shall wc know him — 

By what clear token, — maimers, lani^uage, dress? 
Or shall a voice from Heaven speak ami show him: 

Iliin the swift healer of the l'"-arth's distress 1 
Tell us that wlien the loiii:; expecteil comes 

At last, with miith and mehidy ami singing, 
We him may greet with banners, beat of drums, 

Welcome of men and maids, and joy-bells ringing; 
And, for this poet of ours, 
Laurels and (lowers. 

Thus shall ye know him — tliis shall be his token: 

Manners like other men, an unstrangc gear ; 
His speech not musical, but harsh and broken 

Shall sound at first, each line a driven spear; 
For he shall sing as in the centuries olden, 

Before mankind its earliest fire forgot ; 
Yet whoso listens long hears music golden. 

How shall ye know him? Ye shall know him not 
Till ended hate and scorn, 
To the grave he's borne. 

Richard Watson Gilder. 



(»34) 



CIIAPTKR I. 

J/ISTOR V 01' LliA VJ'iS 01' CRASS. 

Wai/p Whitman began to write for the i^eriodiral press at the 
age of fourteen years — was engaged as editor at maturity and 
afterwards — and continues as conlrii^utor to newspajjers and 
magazines to tliis day. If all he has ever written were eolleeted, 
it would probajjly make many good-sized volumes. 1 have no 
knowledge of any of the pieces in Leaves of Grass before the 
publication of the first edition in 1855. Walt Whitman tells us 
in one of the prose prefaces preserved in Specimen Days, that he 
had more or less consciously the plan of the poems in his mind 
for eight years before, and that during those eight years they 
took many shapes; that in the course of those years he wrote 
and destroyed a great deal ; that, at the last, the work assumed 
a form very different from any at first expected ; but that from 
first to last (from the first definite conception of the work in 
say iH53-'54, until itscompletion in 1881 j his underlying purpose 
was religious. It seems that so much was clear in hi:; mind from 
the beginning, but how the plan was to be formulated seemed not 
at all clear, and had to be toilsomely worked out. A great deal 
else, of course, had to be present in his mind besides the inten- 
tion. In the "Song of the Answerer," enumerating other ele- 
ments necessary for such an enterprise, he says, 

Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, 

withdrawnness, 
Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness — such are some of the words of poems, 

I'hesc he had, and beneath all, and above all, and including 
all, lying below consciousness, he had in unijaralleled perfection 
that rarest master faculty which we call moral elevation. Along 
with these, his race-stock, immerliate ancestry, mode of upbring- 
ing, outer life, surroundings, and American equipment, have to 

('35) 



136 Ua/t Uliitnian. 

be taken into account. It is upon these that he himself always 
lays the most weight. He once said to the present writer, *' The 
" fifteen years from 1840 to 1855 were the gestation or formative 
" periods of Z^-.rrri- of Grass, not only in Brooklyn and New York, 
"■ but from several extensive jaunts through the States — including 
"the Western and Southern regions and cities, Baltimore, Cin- 
'' cinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, the Mississippi 
"and Missouri Rivers, the great lakes and Niagara, and through 
" New York from Buffalo to Albany. Large parts of the poems, 
"and several of them wholly, were incarnated on those jaunts or 
"amid these scenes. Out of such experiences came the physi- 
" ology of Leaves of Grass, in my opinion the main part. The 
"psychology of the book is a deeper problem; it is doubtful 
"whether the latter element can be traced. It is, perhaps, only 
"to be studied out in the poems themselves, and is a hard study 
"there." 

At another time, speaking with more than usual deliberation 
to a group of medical men, friends of his, in answer to their in- 
quiries, on an occasion where I was present, he said, " One main 
" object I had from the first was to sing, and sing to the full, the 
" ecstasy of simple physiological Being. This, when full develop- 
" ment and balance combine in it, seemed, and yet seems, far 
"beyond all outside pleasures; and when the moral element and 
"an affinity with Nature in her myriad exhibitions of day and 
"night are found with it, makes f/ie /ia/>/>j' /\'rs(>//a//(\', the true 
"and intended result (if they ever have any) of my poems." 
This last sentence contains a key to the central secret o( Leaves 
of Grass — that this book, namely, represents a man whose ordi- 
nary every-day relationship with Nature is such that to him 
mere existence is happiness. 

The problem then before him was to express not what he heard, 
or saw, or fancied, or had read, but one for deeper and more diffi- 
cult to express, namely. Himself. To put the man Walt Whitman 
in his book, not especially dressed, polished, prepared, not for con- 
ventional society, but for Nature, for God, for America — given as 
a man gives himself to his wife, or as a woman gives herself to 
her husband — whole, complete, natural — with perfect love, joy, 



History of Leaves of Grass — (r855-'82). 137 

anrl trust. This is something that, as I believe, was never before 
dared or done in literature. This is the task that he set for him- 
self, and that he has accomplished. If the man were merely an 
ordinary person, such a purpose, such a book, written with abso- 
lute sincerity, would possess the most extraordinary interest; but 
Leaves of Grass has an interest far greater, derived from the ex- 
ceptional personality which is embodied in it. Such was, in out- 
line or brief suggestion, the intention with which it was written, 
and the reason for writing it. Then I think a profound part of 
the forecasting of the work was the way in which many things 
were left open for future adjustment. 

By the spring of 1855, Walt Whitman had found or made a 
style in which he could express himself, and in that style he had 
(after, as he has told me, elaborately building up the structure, and 
tlien utterly demolishing it, five different timesj written twelve 
I)oems, and a long prose preface which was simply another poem. 
Of these he printed a thousand copies. It was a thin quarto, the 
preface filling xii., and the body of the book 95 pages, on rather 
poor paper, and in the type printers call " English." The large 
title-page has the words " Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn, New 
York, 1855," only. Facing the title is the miniature of a man 
wlio looks about thirty-five to forty years old. He wears a broad- 
brimmed, wide-awake hat, has a large forehead and strongly- 
marked features. The face (to my mind) expresses sadness and 
goodnature. No part of the face is shaved. The beard is clipped 
rather short and is turning gray. The figure is shown down to 
the knees. This is Walt Whitman from life in his thirty-sixth 
year. The picture was engraved on steel by McRae, of New 
York, from a daguerreotype taken one hot day in July, 1854, by 
Gabriel Harrison, of Brooklyn. (The same picture is used in 
the current 1882 edition.) The twelve poems constituting the 
body of the book are unnamed, except for the words Leaves of 
Grass, which are used as a page heading throughout, and besides 
as a heading to some, but not all, of the individual pieces. Giv- 
ing those twelve 1855 poems the names that they bear in the 
ultimate 1882 edition, the first eleven are : 



1 38 If'/// Whitmnu. 

1. Song of ^fysolf. 7. Sonc; of the Answerer. 

2. A Sons; for (V\nip:\tions. 8. Kiiiope tlio 721! ami 7jil Years of 
^ '1\> riiink of I'imo. These States. 

4. The Sleepers. 9. A Roston Uallad (1S54). 

5. 1 Sinij tlie IJoily I'.leotiie. lo. There was a ChiUl went forth. 

6. laoi's. II. Who 1, earns my Lesson complete. 

The twelfth, though ret.iineil in every cdilioii mUil the pres- 
ent, 1SS2, i.s omittetl from that. Its name in the 1876 eilition is 
"Great are the Mytlis." 

The book now beinj:; nianufaetured, eojues of it were left for 
sale at various bookstores in New York ami Brooklyn. Other 
copies were sent to niaga/.iiies anil newspapers, and others to 
prominent literary men. Of those that were plaeed in the stores 
none were sokl. Those that were sent to the jiress were, in quite 
every instanee, either not notieed at all, laughed af, or reviewed 
with the bitterest and most scurrilous language in the vocabulary 
of the reviewer's contempt. Those sent to eminent writers were 
in several instances returneil, in some cases accomjianied by in- 
sulting notes. 

The first reception of Le\jrcs of Grass by the world was in 
fact about as disheartening as it could be. Of the thousand 
copies of this 1855 edition, some were given away, most of them 
were lost, abandoned, or destroyed. It is certain that the book 
cpiite universally, wherever it was reail, excited ridicule, disgust, 
horror, and anger. It was considered meaningless, badly writ- 
ten, filthy, atheistical, ami utterly reprehensible. And yet there 
were a few, a very few iiuleed, who suspected from the first that 
under that rough exterior might be something of extraordinary 
beauty, vitality, and value. Among these was Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, then at the height of his splendiil lame. He wrote to 
Walt Whitman the following letter: 

CoNCoun. Mass., Jitlv 21st, /Sjj. 
Dear Sir, — I am not bl'nul to the worth of the womlerfiil j^ift of Leaves 
0/ Grass. I liml it tlie most e\traorilinary piece of wit and wisdom (hat 
America has yet contrilnitiii. I am very happy in reading it, as great jiower 
makes us happy. It meets the demaml 1 am always making of what seems 
the sterile and stingy Mature, as if too much liandiwurk ur too much lymph 



History of Leava; of Crass — (i855-'82). 139 

in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you 
joy of your free and hravc thought. I have great joy in it. I find incom- 
jKirablc things, said incomparatjiy well, as they must ije. I find the courage 
of treatment wliich so delights us, and which large percejjlion only can in- 
spire. 

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a 
long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to 
see if this sunbeam were no illusion; hut the solid sense of the book is a 
sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encour- 
aging. 

I did not knrjw, until 1 la:,l night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, 
that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. 

I wish to see my Intnefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and 
visiting New York to pay you my respects. 

K. W. Emkrso.v. 

This letter was eventually published Tat first refused by Walt 
Whitman, but on second and pressing application he consented), 
at the request of Chas. A. Dana, then managing editor of the 
"New York Tribune." Though it could not arrest, it did ser- 
vice in partially offsetting the tide of arJverse feeling and opin- 
ion which overwhelmingly set in against the poet and his book. 
Walt Whitman has since been censured for printing a so-called 
private communication of opinion, not intended for the public. 
In answer to this, besides no proof that the letter was meant to 
be private, the editor of the '^Tribune," who was a personal 
friend of both Walt Whitnoan and Mr. Emerson, would probably 
have been a judge in such matters, and he sought it for the 
columns of his paper, as legitimate and proper to both parties. 
It may be mentioned here that vastly as the two men, R. W. 
Emerson and Walt Whitman, differ in the outward show of their 
expression, there are competent scholars who accept both equally, 
and use them to complement each other.* 

The next year, 1856, the second edition of Leaves of Grass 
was published by Fowler & Wells, 308 Broadway, N. Y., but the 



* Emerson i« the "knight-errant of the moral sentiment;" Whitman accepts the whole 
" relentless kosmOB," and theoretically, at least, sccrns to blur the dihtinction between right 
and wrong. Emerson's fjages are lilce beds of roses and violets; Whitman's like masses of 
sun -flowers and silken-tasselled maize. Emerson soars upward in I'lato's chariot over the 
" fliokering l>a;mon Mu\ " into the pure realm " where all form in one only form dissolves," 
and when he returns his iacc and his raiment are glistening with light caught from that pure 



I40 



IVa// Whitman. 



firm did not put its name on the title-page. The volume is a 
small i6mo. of 3S4 pages. The same miniature of the author is 
used. The words Lt\j7'i-s of Grass are the page-heading through- 
out that part of the volume containing the poems, and besides 
this general title, each poem has a name, but in no instance 
exactly the same as it bears in later issues. The total number 
of poems in this edition is thirty-two. The twenty new poems 
are — (giving them as before the names they bear in the 1882-83 
edition) : 



II. 
12. 



14. 



Unfolded out of the Folds. 

Salut au Monde. 

Song of the Broadaxe. 

By Blue Ontario's Shore. 

This Compost. 

To You. 

Crossing Brooklyn Feny, 

Song of the Open Road. 

A Woman Waits for Me. 

A poem a large part of which is 
left out of the later editions, 
but which is partly preserved in 
"On the Beach at Night Alone." 

Excelsior. 

Song of Prudence. 

A poem which now makes part 
of the "Songof the Answerer." 

Assurances. 



15. To a Foil'd European Revolu- 

tionaire. 

16. A short poem part of which is 

afterwards incorporated in " As 
I sat Alone by Blue Ontario's 
Shore," and the rest of it 
omitted from subscciueat edi- 
tions. 

17. Miracles. 

18. Spontaneous Me. 

19. A poem called "Poem of The 

Propositions of Nakedness," 
afterward called " Respondez," 
and printed in every edition 
subsequent to the 2d down to 
that of i882-'3 — but omitted 
from that. 

20. A Song of the Rolling Earth. 



The prose preface of the first edition did not appear as such in 
this second edition, but part of it was embodied in a few of the 

world of perfect types. But Whitman is like the ash-tree Ygdrasil. whose triple fountain- 
nourished root symbolizes what was done, what is done, and what will be done, and the 
roaring storm-tossed boughs of it reach through the universe and bear all things in their arms. 
Emerson is the sweet and shining Balder ; Whitman, Thor with hammer and belt of strength. 
Toss into the sunlight a handful of purest mountain lake water ; the thousand droplets that 
descend, flash and burn with whitest light, and on the silvery surface of each a miniature 
world lies softly pictured in richest iridescence. Like these droplets are Kincrson's sentences. 
But the writings of Whitman are the golden mirror of the moon lifted up out of immensity by 
some giant hand, that it may throw the refulgence of the sun down among the dark forests of 
earth, over its fair cities, sweet, flowery fields, and dark blue seas, concealing nothing, lighting 
earth's passion and its pain, its nuuders, its hatred and its hideousuess, as well as its music, 
its poetry and its flowers. — Lecture of W. Sloanb Kennedy. 



History of Leaves of Grass — (1855-82). 141 

new pieces, especially in " By Blue Ontario's Shore," " Song of 
the Answerer," "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire," and 
"Song of Prudence." The poems extend to page 342. The 
rest of the volume, called " Leaves Droppings," is made up, first, 
of Pvmerson's letter to Walt Whitman, preceding — second, a 
long letter to Emerson in reply — and third, of twenty-six pages 
of criticisms of the first edition, taken from various quarters, a 
Iftwi favorable, the rest intensely bitter. (Extracts from some of 
these criticisms are given in the Appendix to Part II. of this vol.) 
Not only was this edition also savagely criticised, but so extreme 
was the feeling excited by it, that some good people in New York 
seriously contemplated having the author indicted and tried for 
publishing an obscene book. From this step they were only 
deterred by the consideration that, whatever might be the esti- 
mation which his book deserved, the man Walt Whitman was so 
popular in New York and Brooklyn, that it would be impossible 
to get a jury to find him guilty. 

If any of the poems of Leaves of Grass can be put before the 
rest, we may say that upon the publication of the second edition 
the fundamental and important parts of the author's work were 
done, the foundations squarely and solidly laid, and the lines of 
the edifice drawn with a sure hand. The work, although far 
from completed, was already of supreme beauty and of infinite 
value. What then did men say of it? They received it with 
such a unanimous howl of execration and refusal, that after the 
sale of a small number of copies. Fowler & Wells, the pub- 
lishers, thinking it might seriously injure their business, then 
very flourishing, peremptorily threw it up, and the publication 
ii^ Leaves of Grass ceased. For the next four years the history 
of the work is a blank. 

I am not sure but the attitude and course of Walt Whitman, 
these following years, form the most heroic part of all. He 
went on his way with the same enjoyment of life, the same ruddy 
countenance, the same free, elastic stride, through the tumult of 
sneers and hisses, as if he were surrounded by nothing but ap- 
plause ; not in the slightest degree abashed or roused to resent- 



142 JJ^d/f Whitiiian. 

nient by the taunts and opposition. The poems written directly 
after the coUapse of this second edition (compare, for instance, 
" Starting from raumanok," and " Whoever you are, hoUling me 
now in hand,") are, if j^ossihle, more sympathetic, exultant, ar- 
rogant, and make hirger chiims than any. So far, the book had 
reached no circuU\tion worth mentioning; jirobably not a hui>- 
dred copies had been sold of both first and second editions. It 
is likely that at the time when the publishers of the second edi- 
tion withdrew it from the market not a thousand people had read 
it, and not one in fifty of these would have the least idea what 
it was about. 

Toward the end of the year 1S56 Thorean called npon Walt 
Whitman (Emerson had twice already visited him), anil shortly 
afterwards T. wrote a letter to a friend, extremely curious as 
showing the impression made by the poet at that time upon so 
fine a genius and so sensible a man as the Walden hermit. The 
uncertain tone of the letter, and the contradictions in it, are 
remarkably suggestive : 

Concord, December ytli, 1S56. 

Mr. B . . . . That W.ilt Whitman of whom I wrote to you is the most 
interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which 
he gave me) and it has done me more good tlian any reading for a long time. 
Perhaps I remember best the " Poem of Walt Wiiitman, an American " [now 
called *' Song of Myself"] and the " Sun-down Poem " [now called " Cross- 
ing Brooklyn Ferry"]. There are two or three pieces in the book which are 
disagreeable, to say tlic least; simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at 
all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of 
themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where 
such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete w^ith their 
inhabitants. But even on this side he has spoken more truth than any Amer- 
ican or modern that I know. I have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. 
As for its sensuality — and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears — 
I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and 
women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without 
understanding them. One woman told me that no woman could read it — as 
if a man could read what a woman could not. Of course, Walt Whitman can 
communicate to us no new experience, and if we are shocked, whose expe- 
rience is it we are reminded of? 

On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever 



History of Leaves of Grass — (1855-82). 143 

deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been 
preached in this land, put together, are equal to it for preaching. We ought 
to rejoice greatly in him. lie occasionally suggests something a little more 
than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brook- 
lyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him ! He is 
awfully good. To be sure, I sometime feel a little imposed on. I5y his 
heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind, pre- 
pared to see wonders — and, as it were, sets me upon a hill, or in the midst of 
a plain, — stirs me up well, and then throws in — a thousand of brick ! Though 
rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or 
trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the 
Orientals, too, considering that, when I asked him if he had read them, he 
answered, "No; tell me about them." 

I did not get far in conversation with him, two more being present — and 
among the few things that I chanced to say, I rememl^er that one was, in 
answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America, 
or of politics, and so on — which may have been somewhat of a damper to 
him. 

Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism 
in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better 
right to be confident. 

He is a great fellow. H. D. T. 

During i857-'8-'9 Leaves of Grass was out of print. In i860 
a third edition appeared, very much larger and handsomer than 
either of the preceding, publi.shed by Thayer & Eldridge, of 
Boston, beautifully printed on heavy white paper, and strongly 
bound in cloth — a volume of 456 pages, containing the 32 poems 
of the second edition, and 122 new ones. Many of the pieces have 
individual names, but most of them are named by groups. The 
words Leaves of Grass constitute the headline on the left-hand 
page throughout the volume ; the right-hand page bears the name 
of the poem or group of poems. The likeness of the author, 
which accompanies the two earlier editions (and which appears 
again in the sixth as well as the late complete one;, is replaced in 
the third by another, only used in this edition ; an engraving on 
steel, from an oil painting by Charles Hine, (a valued artist- 
friend of Walt Whitman) — one of the most striking and inter- 
esting likenesses of the poet that has ever been made. The chief 
thing to note about this third edition is that not one word of the 



144 Wa/^ Whitman. 

poems which had given such terrible offence in the earlier issues 
is omitted. The author has not swerved a hair's breadth from 
the line upon which he set out. The volume breathes the same 
all-generous spirit as the earlier issues; the same faith in God, 
the same love of man, perfect patience, and the largest and most 
absolute tolerance. In this edition those poems treating espe- 
cially of sexual passions and acts are, for the first time, grouped to- 
gether under one name, "Children of Adam " (written here "En- 
fans d 'Adam "), Walt Whitman was advised, urged, even im- 
plored by his friends to omit or at least modify these pieces. 
An old and intimate personal friend, urging him one day to leave 
them out, said to him, " What in the world do you want to put 
in that stuff for, that nobody can read ?" He answered with a 
smile, " Well, John, if you need to ask that question, it is evi- 
dent at any rate that the book was not written for you." 

In the course of the summer of i860, while Walt Whitman 
was in Boston, putting that third edition through the press, 
Emerson came to see him, and presently said, " When people 
want to talk in Boston, they go to the Common ; let us go 
there." So they went to the Common, and Emerson talked for 
something like two hours on the subject of " Children of Adam." 
He set forth the impolicy, the utter inadvisability of those poems. 
Walt Whitman listened to all he had to say ; he did not argue 
the point, but when Emerson made an end, he said quietly, "My 
mind is not changed; I feel, if possible more strongly than ever, 
that those pieces should be retained." "Very well," said Emer- 
son, " then let us go to dinner." * 

* In "The Critic" for December 3d, 1881, Walt Whitman gives the following account of 
the interview : " Up and down this breadth by Beacon Street, between these same old elms, 
I walked for two hours, of a bright, sharp February midday twenty-one years ago, with 
Emerson, then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, armed at every point, 
and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those 
two hours he was the talker, and I the listener. It was an argument — statement — recon- 
noitring, review, attack, and pressing home (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, 
infantry), of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of 
my poems, ' Children of Adam.' More precious than gold to me that dissertation (I only 
wish I had it now verbatim). It afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical les- 
son ; each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete 
or convincing — I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my 
soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. ' What 



History of Leaves of Grass — (1855-82). 145 

This third edition, which came out early in the summer of 
i860, was the first that had any sale at all. There was less out- 
cry about it than about the first and second. A class of men 
had begun to appear — a very few — who, having more or less 
absorbed Leaves of Grass, were in a position to hold in check the 
army of detractors. Although it could not be said that public 
opinion was becoming even partially favorable, still a hearing 
was beginning to be established, and here and there both in 
America and England, individuals were rising up to defend the 
book and strike a blow in its advocacy. Just at this time when 
the enterprise looked encouraging, the Secession War ruined 
(among much else) the book-publishing trade. Thayer, Eld- 
ridge failed, and Leaves of Grass was again out of print. Soon 
after (in 1862) Walt Whitman went to the seat of war (see Speci- 
men Days), and poetry was forgotten, or at least laid aside, in 
the vast, vehement, all-devouring interests and duties of the 
time, and the succeeding years. 

Late in 1865 was published "Drum Taps" — poems com- 
posed on battle-fields, in hospitals, or on the march, among the 
sights and surroundings of the war, saturated with the spirit and 
mournful tragedies of that time, including in a supplement, 
"When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," commemora- 
ting the death of President Lincoln. Then in 1867, the war 
being well over, and the ordinary avocations of peace resumed, 
the poet (he had at the time a clerkship in the office of the 
Attorney-General, at Washington) brought out the fourth edi- 
tion, including all the poems written down to that period. This 
volume in size and shape is very similar to the current edition. 
It contains 470 pages and 235 poems. All the old ones are re- 
tained, and about 80 new ones added. The title-page bears the 
words "Leaves of Grass, New York, 1867." This fourth edi- 
tion contains no portrait. It is fairly printed (from the type) on 
good paper, but is not nearly as handsome a volume as the third 
edition. 

have you to say, then, to such things?' said E., pausing in conclusion. 'Only that while I 
can't answer them at all, 1 feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and 
exemplify it,* was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the 
American House." 

13 



146 Wa/i JV/iitf/tan. 

The fifth edition was issued in 1S71. It consisted of one 
good-sized, good-looking vohime (3S4 pages), and a brochure, 
same paper and type, called " Piissage to India" (120 pages). 
The total number of poems in this issue is 263 — all the old, and 
a few new ones, especially the aforesaid "Passage to India." 
This edition was printed from new plates, on thick white paper, 
and is the handsomest edition published up to that time. In it 
all the old poems are carefully revised. This is known as the 
Washington edition. The title-page bears the words " Leaves 
OF Grass, Washington, D. C, 1871." This, like the fourth, 
contains no portrait. It supplied such moderate demand (mostly 
in England) as existed during five years. 

Early in 1S72 Walt Whitman was invited by the students of 
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, to deliver what 
is called "the Commencement Poem." He accepted, went on 
there, had a good time, and the piece given was published in 
book-form in New York soon after under the name of "As a 
Strong Bird on Pinions Free." It had no sale at all. (In the 
present, 1882 edition, it is called "Thou Mother with thy Equal 
Brood.") 

In 1876 the author printed the sixth edition. This — for several 
reasons, the most interesting and valuable of all — is in two volumes, 
one called Leaves of Grass (printed from the same plates as the cor- 
responding volume in the fifth edition), and the other, " Two 
Rivulets." The last named is made up of " Democratic Vistas," 
"Passage to India" (printed from the plates used in the fifth 
edition), and, along with these, four collections of prose and 
verse, called respectively, " Two Rivulets," " Centennial Songs, 
1876," "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," and, in prose, 
" Memoranda During the War." The total number of pages is 
734, and the total number of poems 288. Each volume contains 
the author's autograph, and the two books include three portraits. 
It will not be many years before copies of this Centennial edition 
will bring almost anything that holders of them like to ask. The 
poems contained in it are all included (with many alterations, 
some omissions, additions, etc.) in the 1882 issue; and most of 
the prose is included in Specimen Days, 



History of Leaves of Grass — (i855-'82). 147 

The next Cseventh) edition of Leaves of Grass is that of James 
R. Osgood & Co., Boston, 1881-82. The text is packed as 
closely together as possible in one volume of 382 pages, long 
primer type, containing 293 distinct poems. A itvt of the old 
ones are omitted (generally for the reason that what they con- 
tained was expressed elsewhere), in some instances two are run 
into one, and quite a number of new pieces added. The text 
throughout has been thoroughly revised, hundreds of slight 
alterations have been made, in many places words and lines 
omitted, and as frequently, in other places, words and lines 
added. The arrangement and the punctuation have been mate- 
rially altered for the better, and the poems are so joined and 
blended by slight alterations in the text and by juxtaposition, 
that Leaves of Grass now becomes a unit in a sense it had never 
been before. The original design of the author, formed twenty- 
six years before, has taken shape, and stands in this volume com- 
pleted. 

It is usual to speak, as I have done, of the different " edi- 
tions" of Leaves of Grass, but this term, in one sense, is scarcely 
correct, for an essential point about the work is not only its 
identical but its cumulative character. Those seven different 
issues are simply successive expansions or growths, strictly carry- 
ing out the one idea. 

A peculiarity of Walt Whitman has been his careful attention 
to the minutest details of typography (he is a printer himself, be 
it remembered) in all the issues of Leaves of Grass, and espe- 
cially in the final one. Instead of sending on his copy and re- 
ceiving back proofs by mail, he goes personally to Boston, takes 
a little room in the printing office, settles on the size of page, 
kind of type, how the pieces shall run on, etc. After which, for 
six or seven weeks, every line is vigilantly scanned ; every day 
for two or three hours he is at Rand & Avery's (the printing 
office and foundry) reading proofs, sometimes to the third and 
fourth revision. On the completion of the plates, he remarked 
that if there was anything amiss in the material body of the work, 
it should be charged to him equally with its spiritual sins, for he 
had had his own way about it all. 



148 Walt Whit f nan. 

The subsequent withdrawal of the firm of J. R. Osgood & Co. 
from publishing that seventh edition of Leaves of Grass makes 
it necessary to relate somewhat in detail both how they came to 
be, and how, in a short five or six months, they ceased to be, 
such publishers. In May, 1881, J. R. Osgood wrote to Walt 
Whitman, asking if he had in hand and was disposed to bring 
out a new and complete edition of his poetic works. Walt Whit- 
man wrote back that such an enterprise was contemplated by him, 
but before entering upon any negotiation, it needed to be dis- 
tinctly understood that not a piece or line of the old text was 
intended by him to be left out ; this was an absolute pre-requisite. 
Osgood & Co. then wrote asking if they could see the copy. 
Walt Whitman sent it immediately. Osgood & Co. wrote back 
formally offering to publish, and mentioning terms, which were 
fixed at a royalty of twenty-five cents on every two-dollar copy 
sold. The contract being made, the poet went on to Boston, 
and was there two months (September and October, 1881) en- 
gaged in seeing the poems properly set up. This seventh and 
completed Leaves of Grass was published latter part of Novem- 
ber, 1881. The sale commenced fairly. Several hundred copies 
went to London, and Walt Whitman's royalty from the winter 
and early spring issues amounted to nearly five hundred dollars. 

March ist, 1882, Oliver Stevens, Boston District Attorney 
(under instructions from Mr. Marston, State Attorney-General, 
see further on), sends an official letter* to Osgood & Co. that he 
intends to institute suit against Leaves of Grass and for its sup- 
pression, under the statutes regarding obscene literature. A list 
of pieces and passages is soon after officially specified, and it is 

* Here is this curious document : 

Commo.iwealth of Massachusetts, 

District Attorney's Office, 
Boston, 24 Court House, Alarch ist, 1882. 
Messrs. J. R. Osgood & Co. 

Gentlemen, — Our attention has been officially directed to a certain book, entitled Leaves 
of Crass, Walt Whitman, published by you. We are of the opinion that this book is such 
a book as brings it within the provisions of the public statutes respecting obscene literature, 
and suggest the propriety of withdrawing the same from circulation, and suppressing the 
edition thereof; otherwise the complaints which are proposed to be made will have to be en- 
tertained. 1 am, yours truly, 

(Signed) Oliver Stevens, District Attorney, 



The Attempted Official Suppression, 149 

intimated that upon these being erased and left out, the publica- 
tion may continue. March 21st, Osgood & Co. write Walt Whit- 
man, forwarding this list,* and asking if the words, lines, and 
pieces specified could be left out. March 23d, Walt Whitman 
writes Osgood & Co., " The list, whole and several, is rejected 
"by me, and will not be thought of under any circumstances." 
A week afterwards, Osgood & Co. write Walt Whitman, "The 
official mind has declared it will be satisfied if the pieces ' To 
a Common Prostitute ' and ' A Woman Waits for Me ' are left 
out," and that those two so left out, the book can then go on 
unmolested. (Osgood & Co. add that they have suspended the 
publication and sales, and that orders are waiting.) Walt Whit- 
man peremptorily rejects the proposal to leave out the two pieces. 
Osgood & Co. (April 13th, 1882) courteously but decidedly write 
that they cannot afford to be drawn into any suit of the kind 
threatened by the Boston officials, but must give up Leaves of 
Grass, and that they are ready to turn over the plates to Walt 
Whitman's purchase, (these plates were so consigned to him, and 
no cash royalty ever paid), adding, " We feel it right to say, that 
it is not we who have fixed inflexible conditions under which this 
matter could be decided — those conditions have been fixed by 
yourself." (There is an interior history of the persons and their 
animus behind the scenes, in Boston, who egged on Messrs. Mars- 
ton and Stevens, which has not yet come to the light, but may, 
some day.) 

* The following is the list referred to — (same paging as in the 1882 edition) : 

PAGE LINES PAGE LINES 

31, 15th and i6th. 88, 89, " A Woman Waits for Me." 

32, igth to 22d (inclusive). 90, 91, Whole of 90 and 91, to line 11 (inclu- 
37, 14th and 15th. sive). 

48, 20th to 29th (inclusive). 94, First si.\ lines and half of 7th to words 

49, nth to 20th (inclusive). " indecent calls " (inclusive). 
52, The remainder of paragraph twenty- 216, " The Dalliance of the Eagles." 

eight, beginning at the i2th line. 266, 21st and 22d. 

59, nth and 12th. 299, 300, " To a Common Prostitute." 

66, 15th and i6th. 3°3. 2^ ^"d 3d. 

79, 2ist and 22d. 32S) The remainder of the 4th line from 

80, Entire passage from 14th line, ending bottom,heginning with words "he 

with words "And you, stalwart with his palm." 

loins," on page 81. 331. 9th and loth. 

84, ist to 7th (inclusive). 355, 13th to 17th (inclusive). 

87, 13th to 28th (inclusive). 



150 Walt Whitman. 

After such plain narration of the facts, perhaps the keenest 
and most deserved comment upon this whole transaction (it was 
fitting that the one who attended to Hon. Mr. Harlan in 1865-6 
should also sum up the Marston-Stevens-Osgood affair in 1882) 
is a letter by William D. O'Connor, printed in the "New York 
Tribune" of May 25th, 1882, from which the following are ex- 
tracts : 

If it were not for unduly trenching upon your space, I would like to show 
you the passages which the State District-Attorney pronounced obscene, and 
demanded expurgated. The list furnished by this holy and intelligent man 
is before me, and has twenty-two specifications. Four of the passages 
specified relate to the poet's democratic theory of the intrinsic sacredness 
and nobility of the entire human physiology — identical with the famous 
declaration of Novalis that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost; and 
involve, specially in one or two instances, a rapt celebration of the acts and 
orga^ns of chaste love. Another passage describes the identification through 
sympathy of one's self with lawless or low-down persons. A sixth passage 
under ban is devoted to the majestic annunciation of woman as the matrix of 
the generations — the doctrine that her greatness is the mould and condition 
of all the greatness of man. Another proscribed passage consists of ten pic- 
torial lines, worthy of yEschylus, in which the poet describes the grand and 
terrible dalliance of two eagles, high aloft in the bright air, above a river road. 
A seventh passage specially required to be expunged is the poem nobly en- 
titled " To a Common Prostitute " — I say nobly, because even the large sense 
of the composition is enlarged by its title. The piece is simply indicative of 
the attitude of ideal humanity in this age toward even the lowest or most de- 
graded, and is conceived throughout in the sublime spirit of our times, whose 
theory abandons no one nor anything to loss or ruin, recognizing amelioration 
as the law of laws, and good as the final destiny of all. It is incredible that 
a poem whose whole staple, on the face of it, is to assure the unfortunate 
Magdalen that not until Nature excludes her shall she be excluded from con- 
sideration and sympathy, and to promise her the redemption of the superior 
life — whose entire thesis is plainly and undeniably supreme charity and faith 
in the human ascension — should appear to any mind as an expression of 
obscenity. However, as Swedenborg reminds us, to the devils perfumes are 
stinks. The eighth quarry of the State District- Attorney is the piece entitled, 
" A Woman Waits for Me." If the defence of this poem is to carry with it 
dishonor, I court that dishonor. Nothing that the poet has ever written, 
either in signification or in splendid oratoric music, has more the character of 
a sanctus ; nothing in modern literature is loftier and holier. Beginning with 
an inspired declaration of the absolute conditioning power of sex — a declara- 



TJie Attempted Official Suppression. 151 

tion as simply true as sublime — the poet, using sexual imagery, as Isaiah and 
Ezekiel, as all the prophets, all the great Oriental poets, have used it before 
him, continues his dithyramb in exalted affirmation of the vital procreative 
effects of his book upon the women, that is to say upon the future of America. 
And this glorious conviction of a lofty mission — the consciousness, in one form 
or another, of every philosopher, every apostle, every poet who has worked 
his thought for the human advancement — the faith and the consolation of 
every sower of the light who has looked beyond the hounding hatreds of the 
present to the next ages — the eminently pure, the eminently enlightened, the 
supereminently judicial Boston District-Attorney considers obscene ! The 
remaining fourteen passages marked by his condemnation I need not discuss, as 
they are all included in the first edition of the work indorsed by Emerson. 

As for the part taken by Messrs. Osgood & Company in this shameful 
transaction, what is said should have the conciseness of a brand. It was no 
new book they had undertaken to publish — it had been the talk of two worlds 
for over a quarter of a century. They knew its noble repute in the highest 
quarters, and they also knew what shadows might be cast upon it by booby 
bigotry, by foul sour prudery mincing as purity, or by rotten carnality in its 
hypocrite mask of virtue. Knowing all this, facing possible consequences in 
their agreement to publish without expurgation, and having voluntarily sought 
the publication of the volume, I say it was their duty as gentlemen to stand 
by the bargain they had solicited, and it was no less their interest as men of 
business to advertise the State-Attorney's ridiculous menace in the boldest 
type their printers could furnish, and bid him come on with his prosecution ! 
Time enough to give in when Sidney Bartlett had failed to make a Massa- 
chusetts jury see that in literature we must allow free expressions if we are 
going to have free expression ; — time enough to own defeat when Sidney 
Bartlett or Charles O'Conor failed to make plain, as either would not have 
failed to make plain to even Mr. Oliver Stevens's comprehension, the difference 
between Biblical courage of language and intrinsic intellectual impurity. But 
Messrs. Osgood & Company leave their Pavia unfought, and lose everything, 
including honor. They might have braced themselves with the remembrance 
of Woodfall, standing prosecution heaped on prosecution, in his dark fidelity 
to Junius. They might have gathered grit by trying to imagine John Murray 
flinching from the publication of Byron. On the contrary, shaking in abject 
cowardice at the empty threat of this legal bully, they meanly break their 
contract with the author, abandon the book they had volunteered to issue, and 
drop from the ranks of great publishers into the category of hucksters whose 
business cannot afford a conscience. 

It only remains to point the moral and adorn the tale with the name of the 
Boston District- Attorney. I have called the transaction in which he appears 
as the prime mover shameful, but the word is limp and colorless in its appli- 
cation to such an outrage upon the liberty of thought as he has committed. 



152 Walt Whitman. 

The sense of it mal<es every fibre of one's being seem interknitted with light- 
ning. On such a subject no thinking man or woman in such a country as 
ours will reflect with cold composure. The action of this lawyer constitutes 
a reef which threatens with shipwreck every great book of every great author, 
from Aristophanes to Moliere, from ^schylus to Victor Hugo; and the drop 
of blood that is calm in view of such an outrage proclaims us bastard to the 
lineage of the learned and the brave ! To-day Oliver Stevens has become 
the peril of Shakespeare. He knows well, no one knows it better, that under 
his construction of the statutes neither Shakespeare nor the Bible could be 
circulated, and no one better knows than he that neither of those books is 
obscene. He knows well, Emerson and a host of scholars and men of letters 
in both continents bearing witness, that Walt Whitman's book is no more 
within the meaning of the statutes than Shakespeare or the Bible, but he also 
knows that the charge he has brought against the one lies with at least equal 
force against the others, and if he does not continue his raid upon the great lit- 
erature, it is only because his courage is not equal to his logic. Even his 
bolder and brassier ally in this holy war, Mr. Anthony Comstock, — even he 
tempers valor with discretion for the nonce, and says he " will not prosecute 
the publishers of the classics, unless they specially advertise them" ! There 
are contingencies, it seems, in which the great works of the human mind will 
be brought under the operation of " the statutes against obscene literature." 
Who knows, since fortune favors the brave and enterprising, but that we may 
yet, step by step, succeed in bringing the Fourteenth century into tlie Nine- 
teenth, and reerect Montfaucon — that hideous edifice of scaffolds reared by 
Philippe le Bel, where the blackened corpse of Glanus swung beside the 
carcass of the regicide for having translated Plato, and where Peter Albin 
dangled gibbeted beside the robber for having published Virgil? If this fond 
prospect is still somewhat distant, it is only, it seems, because Mr. Anthony 
Comstock lets his I dare not wait upon I would, and delays the initial step 
until the classics are "specially" advertised. Meanwhile Mr. Oliver Stevens 
also waits for fresh relays of courage, and as yet only ventures to attempt to 
crush Walt Whitman. For that act of daring he shall reap the full harvest 
of reward. We will see whether in this country and in this century he can 
suppress by law the work of a man of genius, and fail of his proper recom- 
pense. He has arrested in Massachusetts the superb book which is the chief 
literary glory of our country in the capitals of Europe — the book of the good 
gray nurse who nourished the wounded and tended many a dying soldier 
through our years of war — and for that valiant action I promise Mr, Stevens 
his meed of immortal remembrance. He has the solemn comfort of having 
been unknown yesterday ; I can offer him the glorious assurance that he will 
not be forgotten to-morrow. 

The Marston-Stevens-Osgood assault, however, instead of 



His Completed Wofks, i882-'83. 153 

bringing about the result intended (a suppression of Leaves of 
Grass), immediately produced quite the contrary effect. The 
book was taken up by a Philadelphia house, Rees Welsh & Co., 
to whose miscellaneous business David McKay succeeded, and 
the latter is now publisher both of the completed poems, and of 
the late prose work, Specimen Days. Of Leaves of Grass the 
firs<" Philadelphia edition (without the omission of a line or 
word) was ready in the latter part of September, 18S2, and all 
sold in one day. And there has been quite a general and steady 
sale since. 

It is this issue, comprehending all, that I allude to throughout 
the present volume as the completed 1S82 (or i882-'83) edition. 
It includes several touches and additions, minor but significant, 
not in any previous issue. 



CHAPTER IL 

ANALYSIS OF THE POEMS, ETC. 

Although, as already stated, Walt Whitman has written much 
else, yet the two now published volumes, 1882-83, the one of 
verse. Leaves of Grass, and the other of prose, Specimen Days 
a7id Collect, may be considered (at any rate so far) as containing 
all that he cares to preserve. For the purpose of comment, the 
prose writings may be divided into, First, the early tales and 
sketches in the Appendix, Secondly, the section of CV/Z?^/ which 
includes several pieces of the highest excellence, entitling the 
author to take equal rank with the greatest masters of prose com- 
position. These essays — especially "Democratic Vistas," "Ori- 
gins of Attempted Secession," *' Preface to 1855 Issue oi Leaves 
of Grass,'^ ''Poetry To-day in America" — are not only of the 
greatest value inherently in themselves, but as presenting the 
prose, intellectual, discriminating, common-sense side of Ameri- 
can Democracy, of which Leaves of Grass exhibits the poetical 
aspect. They thus counterpart one another, and the prose essays 
show (what if we read the poetry only we might be inclined to 
doubt) that the man who saw the future glories of American civ- 
ilization which are set forth in the poetic work, saw also, and fully 
saw, the mean and threatening facts which are visible to ordinary 
men in the present, and which they (many of them) think is all 
there is to see. Thirdly, the first half, or third, of Specimen 
Days (formerly called " Memoranda during the War ") is, as far 
as I know, by far the best work yet written from which to get an 
idea of the Secession struggle of i860-' 65 — who were engaged 
in it, what they actually did, and how they felt and suffered. Its 
want of literary form makes it the more valuable. Had the author 
from his notes distilled a finished work, he must inevitably have 
included coloring and shading from his own after-feelings and 
( 154 ) 



His Poetic and Prose Lessons. 155 

reflections ; but as actually jotted down on the battle-fields and 
in the hospitals, surrounded by the events, scenes, persons 
depicted, it is clearly the reproduction of living incidents under 
the direct observation of the writer, absolutely truthful and una- 
dorned. Fourthly, the last one hundred and twenty pages of 
Specimen Days stands in a category by itself; its correct name 
taken alone would be "The Diary of an Invalid," and it is as 
such that it has its extraordinary and unique value. As Leaves 
of Grass is, from one point of view, a picture of perfect ideal 
health, so may this section oi Specimen Days be received as the 
ideal (though entirely real) picture of sickness. It will remain 
forever a record of how a heroic soul faced and without dejection 
quietly and bravely passed through continued grief, poverty, the 
imminency of death, and great suffering both of mind and body, 
lasting for years. Never before from amid such circumstances 
came such a voice. Leaves of Grass teaches us to strive, to aspire, 
and to dare ; Specimen Days an equally good lesson, that of forti- 
tude, cheerfulness, and even joyousness in defiance (though not 
in a spirit of defiance) of all and any ills. 

Lastly comes Leaves of Grass, the real work of the author's 
life — or from another (and more correct) point of view the image 
of his real work, which was his life itself. After the long period 
of its own and its author's growth, we have it at last in the 1882 
-'83 edition, completed as conceived twenty-six years ago. Dur- 
ing that time every line has been pondered again and again with 
the greatest care. Though the result of spontaneity and spiritual 
impulse, and invariably started thence, the file has in no wise 
been forgotten. Every word and expression found not to come 
up to the standard has been cut out. The new material as pre- 
pared has been fitted into its place ; the old, from time to time, 
torn down and re-arranged. Now it appears before us, perfected, 
like some grand cathedral that through many years or intervals 
has grown and grown until the original conception and full de- 
sign of the architect stand forth. 

In examining this book, the first thing that presents itself for 
remark is its name, by no means the least significant part. It 



156 Walt Whitman. 

would indeed be impossible to select for the volume a more per- 
fect title. Properly understood, the words express what the book 
contains and is. Like the grass, while old as creation, it is 
modern, fresh, universal, spontaneous, not following forms, taking 
its own form, perfectly free and unconstrained, common as the 
commonest things, yet its meaning inexhaustible by the greatest 
intellect, full of life itself, and capable of entering into and 
nourishing other lives, growing in the sunshine (/. e., in the full, 
broad light of science), perfectly open and simple, yet having 
meanings underneath ; always young, pure, delicate and beauti- 
ful to those who have hearts and eyes to feel and see, but coarse, 
insignificant and worthless to those who live more in the artificial, 
(parlors, pictures, traditions, books, dress, jewels, laces, music, 
decorations, money, gentility), than in the natural, (the naked and 
rude earth, the fresh air, the calm or stormy sea, men, women, 
children, birds, animals, woods, fields, and the like). 

I might say here a preparatory word or two about the absence 
of ordinary rhyme or tune in Walt Whitman's work. The ques- 
tion cannot be treated without a long statement, and many pre- 
mises. Readers used to the exquisite verbal melody of Tennyson 
and Longfellow may well wince at first entering on Leaves of 
Grass. So does the invalid or even well person used to artifi- 
cial warmth and softness indoors, wince at the sea, and gale, and 
mountain steeps. But the rich, broad, rugged rhythm and inimi- 
table interior music of Leaves of Grass need not be argued for 
or defended to any real tone-artist. It has already been told 
how, during the gestation of the poems, the author was saturated 
for years with the rendering by the best vocalists and performers 
of the best operas and oratorios. Here is further testimony on 
this point, from a lady, a musician and art-writer, Mrs. Fanny 
Raymond Ritter, wife of Music-Professor Ritter of Vassar Col- 
lege : 

Those readers who possess a musical mind cannot fail to have been struck 
by a peculiar characteristic of some of Whitman's grandest poems. It is ap- 
parently, but only superficially, a contradiction. A fault that critics have most 
insisted upon in his poetry is its independence of, or contempt for, the canons 
of musico-poetical art, in its intermittent, irregular structure and flow. Yet the 



His Rhythmic Interior. 157 

characteristic alluded to which always impressed me as inherent in these — 
especially in some of the Pindaric " Drum-Taps " — was a sense of strong rhyth- 
mical, pulsing, musical power. I had always accounted to myself for this 
contradiction, because I, of course, supposed the poet's nature to be a large 
one, including many opposite qualities; and that as it is impossible to con- 
ceive the Universe devoid of those divinely musical forces, Time, Movement, 
Order, a great poet's mind could not be thought of as an imperfect, one-sided 
one, devoid of any comprehension of or feeling for musical art. I knew, too, 
that Whitman was a sincere lover of art, though not practically formative in 
any other art than poetry. Therefore, on a certain memorable Olympian day 
at the Ritter-house, when Whitman and Burroughs visited us together, I told 
Whitman of my belief in the presence of an overwhelming musical pulse, 
behind an apparent absence of musical form in his poems. He answered 
with as much sincerity as geniality, that it would i'ndeed be strange if there 
were no music at the heart of his poems, for more of these were actually in- 
spired by music than he himself could remember. Moods awakened by music 
in the streets, the theatre, and in private, had originated poems apparently far 
removed in feeling from the scenes and feelings of the moment. But above 
all, he said, while he was yet brooding over poems still to come, he was 
touched and inspired by the glorious, golden, soul-smiting voice of the greatest 
of Italian contralto singers, Marietta Alboni. Her mellow, powerful, delicate 
tones, so heartfelt in their expression, so spontaneous in their utterance, had 
deeply penetrated his spirit, and never, as when subsequently. writing of the 
mocking-bird or any other bird-song, on a fragrant, moonlit summer night, 
had he been able to free himself from ihe recollection of the deep emotion 
that had inspired and affected him while he listened to the singing of Marietta 
Alboni. 

The volume (final edition i882-'83) opens with ten pages of 
short poems called "Inscriptions," some of which were written 
after the body of the work, and are reflections upon its intention 
and meaning. They cannot be understood until the book itself 
has been studied, and its scope and power more or less realized. 
Here, for instance, is one of them : 

Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries. 

For that which was lacking on all your well-fiU'd shelves, yet needed most, I 

bring. 
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, 
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everj'thing, 
A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect, 
But you, ye untold latencies, will thrill to every page. 



158 Walt Whitman. 

And here another : 

Lo, the unbounded sea, 

On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails; 

The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds, she speeds so stately — below emulous 

waves press forward, 
They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam. 

The first of these, I suppose, could not be in any degree ex- 
plained to a person who knew nothing of Leaves of Grass. The 
second admits of a certain degree of explanation v/hich, however, 
would have to be taken on trust by such a person. The ship is 
the book, the ocean is the human mind. The large ship, with all 
sails set, starts on her voyage ; as she presses through the water, 
the waves (the resistances the book meets) roll from her bows 
and down her sides. The angry, hostile criticisms and clamors 
are the bubbles of foam in the wake. 

The first poem of any length, "Starting from Paumanok," 
appeared first in the third (i860) edition, though it was written 
in 1856, immediately after the second (1856) edition was pub- 
lished. It is an introduction or overture. In it the author sets 
forth what he is going to do. He says he intends to celebrate 
man's soul and his body — to drop in the soil of the general 
human character the germs of a greater religion than has hitherto 
appeared upon the earth. He says he will sing the song of com- 
panionship, and write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love. 
Referring to " Children of Adam," he says : 

And sexual organs and acts ! do you concentrate in me — for I am determin'd 
to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious. 

And toward the end of the poem, as a final admonition, he says 
to the reader: 

For your life adhere to me ; 

(I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself 

really to you — but what of that ? 
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?) 

No dainty dolce afifettuoso I ; 

Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived. 
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, 
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. 



His Central Poem. 159 

The stress of the book opens with the poem (hitherto named 
"Walt Whitman," now) " Song of Myself," the largest and most 
important that the author has produced, and perhaps the most 
important poem that has so far been written at any time, in any 
language. Its magnitude, its depth and fulness of meaning, 
make it difficult, indeed impossible, to comment satisfactorily 
upon. In the first place, it is a celebration or glorification of 
Walt Whitman, of his body, and of his mind and soul, with all 
their functions and attributes — and then, by a subtle but inevita- 
ble implication, it becomes equally a song of exultation, as sung 
by any and every individual, man or woman, upon the beauty 
and perfection of his or her body and spirit, the material part 
being treated as equally divine with the immaterial part, and the 
immaterial part as equally real and godlike with the material. 
Beyond this it has a third sense, in which it is the chant of cos- 
mical man (the etre supreme of Comte) — of the whole race con- 
sidered as one immense and immortal being. From a fourth 
point of view it is a most sublime hymn of glorification of exter- 
nal Nature. The way these different senses lie in some passages 
one behind the other, and are in others inextricably blended 
together, defies comment. But beyond all, the chief difficulty 
in criticising this, as all other poems in Leaves of Grass, is that 
the ideas expressed are of scarcely any value or importance com- 
pared with the passion, the never-flagging emotion, which is in 
every line, almost in every word, and which cannot be set forth 
or even touched by commentary. If, again, the reviewer tries 
to impress the deeper meaning upon his reader by quoting pas- 
sages, he finds that this expedient is equally futile, because no ex- 
tract will make upon the reader an impression at all correspond- 
ing to that produced by the same lines upon a person to whom 
the whole poem is familiar. The " Song of Myself" is not only 
a celebration of man (any man), his soul and body, but it is a 
celebration of everything else as well (necessarily so, since, as 
Walt Whitman expresses it, "Objects gross and the unseen soul 
are one ") — of the earth and all there is upon it — of the universe, 
and of the Divine Spirit that animates it — that is it. The reader 
is not merely told that these things are good, and persuaded or 



i6o Wa/l W/utjnan. 

argued into believing it (that has been done a thousand times, 
and is a small matter), but he is brought into contact with, and 
absolutely fused in the living mind of Walt Whitman, to whom 
these things are so, not as a matter of speculation and belief, but 
as a matter of vital existence and identity: and as he reads the 
poem (it may be for the fifth or the fiftieth time), the state of 
mind of the author inevitably (in some measure) passes over to 
the reader, and he practically becomes the author — becomes the 
person who thinks so, knows so, feels so. But, until this point 
is reached (and with many readers, so far, it is never reached), the 
poem is necessarily more or less meaningless, and besides is dis- 
pleasing from what critics call its "egotism," a quality well 
known to the author, who (in the first as well as subsequent edi- 
tions) says: 

I know perfectly well my own egotism. 

Know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less, 

And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself. 

When the reader is brought " flush " with or up to the spiritual 
level of the book (if this ever happens), he finds, as Walt Whit- 
man tells him, that it is himself talking just as much as the man 
who wrote the book — that in fact the "ego" is the reader fully 
as much as the writer. The poet speaks for himself in the first 
place of course, but he speaks also just as much for others, as he 
says : 

It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, 
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd. 

Then the range is outdoors almost perpetually. No critic of 
the poems can fail to notice the entire absence of any book- 
shelf or easy-chair character in them. Many readers will con- 
sider it a fault ; at any rate the pieces, from first to last, give out 
nothing of the atmosphere of a permanent indoor home.* 



* " Poets' Homes " for 1879 (Mrs. Mary Wager-Fisher) says : As to Walt Whitman's 
home, it must be confessed that he has none, and for many years has had none in the special 
sense of "home;" neither has he the usuallibrary or " den" for composition and work. He 
composes everywhere— years ago, while writing Leaves 0/ Grai-.r, sometimes on the New 
York and Brooklyn ferries, sometimes on the top of omnibuses in the roar of Broadway, or 



His Backgrounds of Meaning. i6i 

One peculiarity is the indirectness of the language in which 
it is written. This is at first a serious obstacle to the comprehen- 
sion of the poems, but after the key has been found, it adds mate- 
rially to the force and vividness of expression. In places where 
a thought or fact is expressed in the usual direct manner, there 
is frequently a second and even a third meaning underlying the 
first. The following examples, which are taken from the " Song 
of Myself," will serve to give an idea of the feature in question, 
which belongs more or less to the whole volume : 

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with per- 
fumes, 
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, 
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. 

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odor- 
less, 
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, 

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, 
I am mad for it to be in contact with me. 

In this passage "Houses and rooms" are the schools, religions, 
philosophies, literature ; " perfumes " are their modes of thought 
and feeling; the "atmosphere" is the thought and feeling ex- 
cited in a healthy and free individual by direct contact with 
Nature; to be "naked" is to strip off the swathing, suffocating 
folds and mental wrappings derived from civilization. 

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems, 

means, Live with me (with .my book) until my mode of thought 
and feeling becomes your mode of thought and feeling. 

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the 
end, 

amid the most crowded haunts of the city, or the shipping by day — and then at night, often 
in the democratic amphitheatre of the Fourteenth Street Opera House. The pieces in his 
"Drum Taps " were all prepared in camp, in the midst of war scenes, on picket or the 
march, in the army. He now spends the summers mostly at a solitary farm " down in Jer- 
sey," where he likes best to be by a secluded, picturesque pond on Timber Creek. It is in 
such places, and in the country at large, in the West, on the Prairies, by the Pacific — in cities 
too, New York, Washington, New Orleans, along Long Island shore where he well loves to 
linger, that Walt Whitman has really had his place of composition. 

14 



1 62 IVa/t Whitjnan. 

means, I have studied what has been taught in the philosophies 
and religious systems as to the Creation or the final destinies and 
purposes of men and things. 

I am satisfied — I see, dance, laugh, sing; 

As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and 

withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread. 
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their 

plenty, 
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes 
That they turn from gazing after and down the road. 
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent. 
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead ? 

means, I am contented and happy as I am ; refreshed with sleep, 
I have all I need ; that being the case, shall I put off the enjoy- 
ment of life, and blame myself that I do not take part with the 
world in studies, money-making, ambition and the like, or spend 
my time calculating what is best to do, say, etc. ? 

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams; 
Now I wash the gum from your eyes. 

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of 
your life ; 

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore; 
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer. 

To jump off in the riiidst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laugh- 
ingly dash with your hair; 

means, You have long enough been degraded by ancient super- 
stitions, followed the systems, the schools, the religions handed 
down from old times, all taken for granted, wanting courage to 
look for yourselves ; now I propose to have you face all things 
and your fortunes with confidence and faith, and live a free and 
joyful life. 

I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house, 

means, I will never more think, or have you think, of love or 
death in the conventional ways, with the old limitations (the 
walls of the house) or with the feeling of dread (in the case of 
death). 



The theme of Sexuality in his Poems. 163 

And filter and fibre your blood, 

means, and purify and strengthen your spiritual nature. 

These examples might be multiplied to almost any extent, for 
a large part of this poem, as of all Leaves of Grass, is made up 
of language which I have characterized as indirect, but which, 
when understood, is seen to be more direct than any other. 
This "Song of Myself" is, in the highest sense of the word, a 
religious poem. From beginning to end it is an expression of 
Faith, the most lofty and absolute that man has so far attained. 
There are passages in it expressive of love or sympathy, but taken 
as a whole, the groundwork and vivifying spirit of the poem is 
Faith. 

Following the "Song of Myself," comes the group called "Chil- 
dren of Adam." ("He that will deepest serve men," says De 
Foe, " must not promise himself that he shall not anger them.") 
These poems having been misunderstood, as was indeed inevitable 
at first, have given rise to condemnatory criticism not only 
against the pieces themselves (which really form a small propor- 
tion of the whole work), but against the rest of the book, and its 
author. Perhaps these poems can only be justified as they justify 
themselves, by altering the mental attitude of society and litera- 
ture towards the whole subject treated in them ; and this of course 
will take time, no doubt several generations. For, though to a 
few thoughtful people, women as well as men, these parts either 
require no justification, or are already justified by the process in- 
dicated, yet probably the vast majority of persons now living in 
the most civilized countries could never be got to believe, and 
could never if they tried make themselves see, that the mental 
attitude represented by Walt Whitman is higher and better (as it 
certainly is, and time will prove itj than has before existed to- 
wards all things relating to sex. The following on the subject is 
from a criticism by Joseph B. Marvin in the Boston quarterly 
" Radical " for August, 1877 : 

There are two phases of Whitman's poetry we have barely alluded to : his 
treatment of sex, and his form of expression ; his celebration of amativeness, 
and his art. It is these, chiefly, that have given offence. As to the first — as 
to sexuality — there is an instinct of silence, which, it is said, Whitman, in his 



164 lVc2/t Whitman. 

group of poems entitled " Children of Adam " rudely ignores and overrides. 
But so does the physiologist and the true physician ignore this instinct and 
break the silence : and properly so. And this poet of Democracy is a physi- 
cian of both soul and body. He comes to diagnosticate the disease in the 
intellect, in the art, in the heart, of America to-day. And what does his 
discriminating eye discern ? He sees that there is a false sense of shame at- 
taching, in the modern mind, to the sexual relation. There is tacit admis- 
sion among men and women everywhere, in our time, that there is inherent 
vileness in this relation, in sex itself, and in the body. We come honestly 
enough by this belief. The tradition is very old. It began witli Judaism, 
and Christianity has maintained it. The Church chants it in her litanies; 
and Puritanism has emphasized it, and formulated it into an iron creed. The 
body's vileness is traced back in our traditions even to the beginning of the 
human race. Nor is there any concession of the possibility of purification 
on the earth. Was it not time that one came who should break the long 
silence about sexuality ? who should show that what men have been dumb 
about, and ashamed of, through all these years, is not foul, but holy — holy as 
love; holy as birth, and fatherhood, and motherhood, to which it all pertains? 
And who, better than the poet, was entitled and qualified to perform this ser- 
vice ? For, to him, the real is visible always in its ideal relations. And did 
not the achievement of this high task and service devolve naturally and espe- 
cially upon the poet of Democracy ; upon him who is distinctively the attestor 
and celebrator of the greatness and the divineness in men and women ; who 
is the interpreting, rapt Lucretius of human nature ? Before Whitman came, 
there had been plenty of half-praise of human nature, and no end of the 
demagogue's vulgar flattery. But at last comes one who reveres mankind; 
by whom all, all of man is honored ; and in whose eyes sexuality, the body, 
the soul, are equally pure and sacred. Again, was it not fitting that he who 
has celebrated death as has no other poet, should likewise celebrate birth : 
and not only birth, but the prelude of birth, — procreation and begetting ? 

And now at length, the task achieved, this service to humanity performed, 
let the instinct of silence, if you will, again prevail. The purpose for which 
the spell was broken is accomplished. The flesh is freed from its false 
repute. The " fall " is finished. Henceforth humanity ascends. Democ- 
racy now for the first time interpreted and understood, man may begin to 
achieve his destiny intelligently, and in fulness of self-respect. 

But even if this spiritual necessity and emergency had not existed, it may 
easily be shown that Whitman is justified, from a literary and artistic point of 
view, in all that he has written of the amative passion. In his large celebra- 
tion of humanity, one of the incidental undertakings, subservient to his larger 
purpose, was the cataloguing of mankind's myriad belongings and relations. 
He would write the inventory of man's illimitable possessions. He would 
assure him of his own riches ; and, by these means, impressing him with some 



J. B. Marvin's Criticism. 165 

approximate sense of his own importance, he might hope to arouse within him 
the self-assurance and the lofty pride which are the basis of individuality and 
true Democracy. And, read in the rapt spirit of joy and adoration in which 
they were written, these mere lists and schedules become sut^limcst poems. 
But what kind of an inventory f>f the attriljutes and endowments of mankind 
■would that be which omitted sexuality ; tlie amative act; procreation? Not 
thus did antique genius record the natural history of man. The men of the 
Bible, and of the " Iliad," and of Shakespeare's dramas, were lusty, and 
loved, and wived, and begot children. Has all this changed in our time? 
Is ours the age of the neuter gender ? It would seem so from our popular 
literature. 

A critic of our popular literary school avers that there is not an impure 
word in Shakespeare, but that Whitman is obscene. Such a declaration as 
this is the result of a literary glamour which renders moral discrimination 
simply impossible. Every line of Shakespeare is justified by the standard of 
supreme art; but whether the critic means to say that the great dramatist's 
writings are free from textual impurities, or from moral licentiousness, his 
assertion is equally untrue and absurd. There is not a play of Shakespeare 
in which the text is not altered upon the stage to suit the prudery of our time ; 
and this critic himself could hardly be persuaded, notwithstanrling his asser- 
tion, to read " Venus and Adonis" to a miscellaneous company. But Walt 
Whitman, though he is gross and rude, is always pure. His grossness is the 
grossness of Nature, of rude health. Shakespeare's treatment of the amor- 
ous passion is often that of the gallant and the voluptuary. Whitman's never; 
for, though he celebrates the sensuous, he never writes in the interest of sen- 
suality, but of fatherhood and maternity. He avows and rejoices in the deli- 
ciousness of sex; but, like Plato in the " Republic," he demands sanity and 
health in it all, and as the result of it all. He is the one poet, in all time, 
who has celebrated sex in the interest of human progress ; in the service of 
health, — physical and moral, — of equality, Democracy, religion. They who 
think they find him obscene, in truth find Nature obscene, — find themselves 
obscene. 

Leaves of Grass is really the largest single step ever taken in 
this special line of progress towards sexual purity. Sexual shame 
as an inherent rule or concept in the normal mind, being 
abolished (as it must eventually be), it does not follow that 
sexual organs, acts and feelings should be paraded or unveiled. 
There is no corresponding feeling of shame connected with our 
feelings towards our own genesis, our fathers and mothers, our 
children, our most intimate friends, or with our religious feelings, 
or our deepest feelings towards Nature. What is wanted (and 



1 66 Walt Whitman. 

must be done) is to abolish the feeling of inherent shame, to 
make recognized in the hearts of all, the purity, holiness and 
perfect sanity of the sexual relation in itself, in its normality, 
and then leave this feeling to take its place with all the other 
deep and strong emotions. 

Next after " Children of Adam," comes the group of poems 
called *' Calamus." As the " Song of Myself " sets before us an 
exalted moral attitude toward the universe at large, and leads us 
to realize and acquire (each for him or her self) this higher and 
happier mode of thought and feeling — as "Children of Adam" 
does the same service for us towards all things relating to sex, so 
"Calamus" presents to us an equally advanced moral state in 
another direction — an exalted friendship, a love into which sex 
does not enter as an element. The following, on this subject, is 
from an article entitled "Walt Whitman the Poet of Joy," by 
Standish O'Grady, in the "Gentleman's Magazine," London, 
December, 1875 : 

Of the new ideas which Whitman has cast as seed into the American brain, 
the importance which he attaches to friendship is the most remarkable. This 
appears to have been a subject over which he has brooded long and deeply. 
It is not possible that Whitman could have written as he has upon this and 
kindred subjects if he were merely a cultivated brain and nothing more. A 
thin-blooded, weak-spirited man may, doubtless, like Swedenborg, strike pro- 
found truths through sheer force of intellect, or may use violent and swelling 
language with little dilatation in his spirit ; but there is a genuineness and 
eloquence in Whitman's language concerning friendship which preclude the 
possibility of the suspicion that he uses strong words for weak feelings. It 
must not be forgotten that, though now latent, there is in human nature a 
capacity for friendship of a most absorbing and passionate character. The 
Greeks were well acquainted with that passion, a passion which in later days 
ran riot and assumed abnormal forms ; for the fruit grows ripe first, then over- 
ripe, and then rots. In the days of Homer friendship was an heroic passion. 
The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus was for many centuries the ideal 
after which the young Greeks fashioned their character. Nowadays friend- 
ship means generally mere consentaneity of opinions and tastes. With the 
Greeks it was a powerful physical feeling, having physical conditions. Beauty 
was one of those conditions, as it is now between the sexes. In the dialogues 
of Plato we see the extraordinary nature of the friendships formed by the 



A manly Friendship, sane, heroic, passionate. 167 

young men of his time, the passionate absorbing nature of the relation, the 
craving for beauty in connection with it, and the approaching degeneracy and 
threatened degradation of the Athenian character thereby — which Plato vainly 
sought to stem, both by his own exhortations and by holding up the powerful 
example of Socrates. There cannot be a doubt but that with highly developed 
races friendship is a passion, and like all passions more physical than intel- 
lectual in its so^pces and modes of expression. 

I will sing the song of companionship ; 

1 will show what alone must finally compact These ; 

I believe These are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it in me ; 

1 will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me ; 

I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires; 

1 will give them complete abandonment ; / 

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades, and of love ; 

For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy? 

And who but 1 should be the poet of comrades ? 

This is strong language, and doubtless genuine. Pride and love, I have 
said. Whitman considers the two hemispheres of the brain of humanity, and 
by love he means not alone benevolence and wide sympathy and the passion 
that embraces sexual relation, but that other passion which has existed before, 
and whose latent strength the American poet here indicates as a burning and 
repressed flame. Elsewhere he speaks of the sick, sick dread of unreturned 
friendship, of the comrade's kiss, the arm round the neck — but he speaks to 
sticks and stones ; the emotion does not exist in us, and the language of his 
evangel-poems appears simply disgusting. 

Yes, "disgusting" to fops and artificial scholars and prim 
gentlemen of the clubs — but sane, heroic, full-blooded, natural 
men will find in it the deepest God-implanted voices of their 
hearts. 

The next poem is called " Salut au Monde," and is, as its 
name implies, a salutation to the whole of the rest of the world, 
sent in America's name. It begins in a low key, broad and calm, 
but becomes more and more impassioned as it proceeds, until 
towards its close the intensity of the feeling expressed becomes 
almost painful. 

The "Song of the Open Road," which follows next in order, 
is one of the supremely great poems of Leaves of Grass. It is a 
mystic and indirect chant of aspiration toward a noble life, a 
vehement demand to reach the very highest point that the hu- 
man soul is capable of attaining — to join the "great compan- 



l68 Wa//' Whitman. 

ions," " the swift and majestic men, the greatest women," who 
have from age to age shown wliat human lite might be. This is a 
religious poem in the truest and best sense of the term. Not the 
imitative sense in which "Paradise Regained," "The Course 
of Time," or "Yesterday, To-day and Forever," are religious 
poems; they go back to other poems, other booV'-i and depend 
on them for their meaning. But this and the other chants of 
Leaves of Grass go back to Nature and the soul of man, and de- 
rive thence their meaning. 

But it is unnecessary and would take too much space to review 
the whole book in detail, and to show, as might be shown, how 
the whole poem (for Leaves of Grass is really one poem) has for 
its purpose simply to carry exalted morality into all the affiiirs 
and relations of life — to exhibit it, for instance, in " Salut au 
Monde " and "Faces," as toward the lower races and classes of 
mankind ; in "Memories of President Lincoln," "To Think of 
Time," and many other poems, as toward death ; in " So Long" 
and "Years of the Modern," as toward the future generally; in 
"To You," and numerous other pieces, as toward average hu- 
manity; in "Our Old Feuillage," as toward the United States 
of to-day, and in the "Song of the Broadaxe," as toward the 
special future of America, In the third (iS6o) edition, the last- 
named poem contained the following lines, which have been left 
out of later issues, I suppose as being too fully and frankly per- 
sonal, but for that very reason they shall have a place here. They 
form a life-picture that might be readily recognized in New 
York City or Brooklyn, on the East River there, or Broadway, 
by those who can carry their reminiscences back twenty-five or 
thirty years : 

His shape arises, 

Arrogant, masculine, naive, rowdyish, 

Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman, 

Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the 
sea. 

Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint 
from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean- 
breathed. 



His self -drawn Portrait. 169 

Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full 
blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back, 

Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined, 

Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms. 

Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck gray and open, of slow move- 
ment on foot. 

Passer of his right arm round the shoulders of his friends, companion of the 
street, 

Persuader always of people to give him their sweetest touches, and never their 
meanest, 

A Manhattanese bred, fond of Brooklyn, fond of Broadway, fond of the life 
of the wharves and the great ferries, 

Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily understood after all. 

Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his phrenology. 

Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive, of 
copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem, comparison, indi- 
viduality, form, locality, eventuality. 

Avowing by life, manners, works, to contribute illustrations of results of The 
States, 

Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism, 

Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his. 

The poem entitled "The Answerer" is a description of the full 
poet (Walt Whitman or any other). The term is given a higher 
meaning here than it usually bears. The class of men usually 
called poets are here called "singers," and the word Poet is used 
for another, a smaller and far higher order of man. Of that 
higher order "The Answerer" says: 

Him all wait for, him all yield up to, his word is decisive and final. 
Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light. 
Him they immerse, and he immerses them. 

The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets. 

The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough — but rare has the 

day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the 

Answerer, 
(Not every century nor every five centuries has contain'd such a day, for all 

its names.) 

Before " The Answerer " can be appreciated, it is essential that 
Leaves of Grass as a whole should be pretty thoroughly absorbed, 
and the true rank of its author realized. 

15 



I/O IVa// Whiftptati. 

Passing now over a largo number of poems, many of them as 
great as any in the voUnne, we come to a group which has a spe- 
cial celebrity, namely, "Drum-Taps." 'rhcse, with the excep- 
tion of a few. are short pieces, and to my mind not by any means 
equal to those which, in date of composition, preceded them. 
The fire that burned in " Song of Mpelf," '* ChiUlron o( Adam." 
"Calamus." "The Song of the Open Road." "Saint an Monde," 
"Faces," "Songs betore Parting," and some otIuT jncces, with 
such almost unbearable lu\u and radiance, was beginning to die 
out. Tliey are. it is true, the most beautiful poems NN'alt Whit- 
man has written. Tliey to-day, and probably for many years 
(perhaps always^, will have more readers and admirers than any 
other portion of his works, but they would never i^not a thiMisand 
such poems^ alter materially for tlie bettor a lumian lite. They 
help the others, and are important, perhaps essential, as taking 
their place with the rest. They are warmed by the divine (\\\\* 
but not capable alone of kindling that lire in anotlicr luunin 
soul. !Many clever critics (^like Th. Bent/on, the reviewer of 
Li^avrs of Gr.iss in the "Revue des deux Moniles") admire 
'• Drum-Taps" immensely, whije they tuul the "Song of Myself " 
"nonsense." According to such reviewers Walt Whitman was, 
when he wrote these pieces, at the end of his apprenticeship, and 
beginning to write good verses! He was certainly progressing, 
but in what sense? A few more steps of the same length in the 
same direction, towards beauty of execution with loss of strength 
— towards fulness of expression with loss of suggestion — towards 
greater polish and f-\cility of pleasing with loss of power of 
arousing and vivifying — anil Walt ^Vllitman would be upon the 
plane of the "great poets" of the Nineteenth century. Hut, 
thank God, he can never take those steps. He is safe from this 
fate. The day will come when he will be popular, but it will be 
when men grow up to him, not when he comes down to them. 
In " Drum-Taps" Walt Whitman's genius has " not yet lost all 
its original brightness, nor appears less than Archangel ruined." 

* The London " Nineteenth Century" (December, i88a) s.iys of " Drum-Taps," " It con- 
tains some of the most m:\gnillcent anJ spirit-stirring trumpet-blasts, as well as some of the 
most deeply moving aspects of sutTcring and death, ever expressed by poet." 



Emotional element of " Drum^Taps" 17 r 

It is still divine, still immeasurably above (not by degree merely, 
but by kind) that of every other poet of the present time, but it 
is not the genius that poured out the fiery torrent of the earlier 
poems. Ha^l we never known those, we might think that words 
could not convey greater passion than they are made to bear in 
some of " Drum -Taps ; " but now we know better. And it is 
not only in amount but also in kind of passion that " Drum- 
Taps " fall short. The splendid faith of the earlier poems is not 
extinct, indeed, in these, but it is greatly dimmed. On the other 
hand, love and sympathy are as strongly expressed here as any- 
where else in Leaves of Grass. I have been told by a person who 
knew the poet well, and who was living in Washington when 
"Drum-Taps" were being composed, that he has seen Walt 
Whitman at this time turn aside into a doorway or other out-of- 
the-way place on the street, and take out his note-book to write 
some lines of these poems, and while he was so doing he has seen 
the tears run down his cheeks. I can well believe this, for there 
are poems in " Drum-Taps " that can sf;arcely be read aloud after 
their full meaning has once been felt. But the tears shed by 
Walt Whitman in writing these poems, while they indicate to as 
clearly the passionate sympathy which dictated them, show also 
a loss of personal force ii. e. faith) in the man who some years 
before wrote "Children of Adam" and " Calamas " without 
flinching. 

From "Drum-Taps" to the end of the volume TiSSa edition) 
there are one hundred and twenty pages of poetry, most of 
it belonging to the first order of excellence, a good deal of it 
written in what may be called the " Song of Myself" period. 
" By Blue Ontario's Shore," for instance, was nearly all published 
in the 1855 edition, but at that time in the shape of a prose pre- 
face. The "Sleepers" was also published in that edition, and 
ranks among the very great poems. It is a representation of the 
mind during sleep — of connected, half-connected, and dLscon- 
nected thoughts and feelings as they occur in dreams, some com- 
monplace, some weird, some voluptuous, and all given with the 
true and strange emotional accompaniments that belong to them. 
Sometimes (and these are the most astonishing parts of the poem) 



1/2 jraU Whitman. 

the vague emotions, without thought, that occasionally arise in 
sleep, are given as they actually occur, apart from any idea — the 
words having in the intellectual sense no meaning, but arousing, 
as music does, the state of feeling intended. It is a poem that 
with most people requires a great deal of study to make anything 
of it, but to certain minds it would, no doubt, be plain at once. 

The next group, called "Whispers of Heavenly Death," con- 
tains some exquisite poems on that subject, of which the follow- 
ing is perhaps a fair sample : 

I need no assurances, I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul; 

I do not doubt that from under the feet and beside the hands and face 1 am 

cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant of — calm and 

actual faces, 
I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world arc latent in any iota 

of the world, 
I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless — in vain I 

try to think how limitless, 
I do not doubt that the orbs and the systems of orbs play their swift sports 

through the air on purpose, and that I shall one day be eligible to do 

as much as they, and more than they, 
I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and on millions of years, 
I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, 

and that the eyesight has another eyesight, and the hearing another 

hearing, and the voice another voice, 
I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are provided 

for, and that the deaths of young women and tlie deaths of little cinl- 

drcn are provided for, 
(Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Dcatli, the purport of all 

Life, is not well provided for ?) 
I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them, no 

matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has gone down, are 

provided for, to the minutest points, 
I do not doubt that whatever can possibly liappen anywhere at any time, is 

provided for in the inherences of things, 
I do not think Life provides for all, and for Time and Space, but I believe 

Heavenly Death provides for all. 

How a man who spent his whole life writing just such poems 
as that (and what is better, living them) can be considered by a 
vast majority of the community an irreligious person is one of 



"Prayer of Columbus y 173 

those terrible mysteries which may be explained a hundred times, 
but remains incomprehensible at last. Or consider the " Prayer 
of Columbus " (really, under a thin disguise, the prayer of Walt 
Whitman; — the deep below deep of meaning and feeling in those 
passionate, most religious lines: 

O, I am sure they really came from Thee, 

The urge, the ardor, the unconquerahle will, 

The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words, 

A message from the heavens whispering to me, even in sleep; 

These sped me on. 

One effort more, my altar this bleak sand : 

That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted 

With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee, 

Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light. 

Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages ; 

For that, O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees. 

Old, poor and paralyzed, I thank Thee, 

My terminus near. 

The clouds already closing in upon me. 
The voyage balked, the course disputed, lost, 
I yield my ships to Thee. 

My hands, my limbs grow nerveless. 

My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd ; 

Let the old timbers part, I will not part, 

I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me. 

Thee, Thee at least I know. 

How is it possible for any one to look into the heart here 
thrown open, and not recognize what kind of man it belongs to? 

The volume concludes with "So Long," a sublime farewell, 
of which the following is the last part : 

My songs cease, I abandon them, 

From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you. 

Camerado, this is no book. 

Who touches this touches a man, 

(Is it night? are we here together alone?) 

It is I you hold and who holds you, 

I spring from the pages into your arms — decease calls me forth. 



1/4 WaU Whitman. 

how your fingers drowse me, 

Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears, 

1 feel immerged from head to foot, 
Delicious, enough. 

Enough O deed impromptu and secret. 

Enough O gliding present — enough O summ'd-up past. 

Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss, 

1 give it especially to you, do not forget me, 

I feel like one who has done work for the day to retire awhile, 

I receive now again of my many translations, from my avataras ascend- 
ing, while others doubtless await me. 

An unknown sphere more real than I dream'd, more direct, darts awak- 
ening rays about me, So lo7ig ! 

Remember my words, I may again return, 

I love you, I depart from materials, 

I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead. 



CHAPTER III. 

ANALYSIS OF POEMS, CONTINUED. 

I HAVE now reviewed briefly from my point of view the book in 
which Walt Whitman has, as far as such a thing is possible, em- 
bodied himself. It remains to state as well as I can the inner 
and more specific significance of the poems. After their unques- 
tionable birthmarks, so different from European models or from 
any copied or foreign type whatever,* the first thing to be 
noticed about Leaves of Grass (this is what strikes nearly every 
one immediately upon trying to read it) is the difficulty to the or- 
dinary, even intelligent reader, of understanding it. On this point 
my own experience has been as follows. About eighteen years 
ago, I began to read it. For many months I could see abso- 
lutely nothing in the book, and at times I was strongly inclined 
to believe that there was nothing in it to see. But I could not let 
it alone ; although one day I would throw it down in a sort of 
rage at its want of meaning, the next day or the day after I would 
take it up again with just as lively an interest as ever, persuaded 

* The London " Times " (June, 1878), in an article on the death of William Cullen Bryant, 
takes for its main theme this excessive imitativeness of American poets, and their entire 
want of special nativity, adding, " Unless Walt Whitman is to be reckoned among the poets, 
American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of 
gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction." 

The same English journal (March 25, 1882), in an editorial on the death of Longfellow, 
continues in a similar strain, "We are not forgetting his 'Hiawatha' when we say that he 
might have written his best poems with as much local fitness in our own Cambridge as in its 
namesake across the Atlantic ; " and sulkily adds : "We are told that in Walt Whitman's 
rough, barbaric, untuned lines, full of questionable morality, and unfettered by rhyme, is the 
nucleus of the literature of the future. That may be so, and the Leaves of Grass may prove, 
as is predicted, the foundation of a real American literature, which will mirror the peculiarities 
of the life of that continent, and which will attempt to present no false ideal. Yet we shall be 
surprised if the new school, with its dead set towards ugliness and its morbid turn for the bad 
sides of nature, will draw people wholly away from the stainless pages, rich in garnered wealth, 
fancy and allusions, and the sunny pictures, which are to be found in the books of the poet 
who has just died." 

( 175 ) 



176 Walt Whitman. 

that there was something there, and determined to find out what 
that might be. At first as I read, it seemed to me the writer was 
always on the point of saying something which he never actually 
said. Page after page seemed equally barren of any definite 
statement. Then after a time I found that a few lines here and 
there were full of suggestion and beauty. Gradually these bright 
spots, as I may call them, grew larger, more numerous and more 
brilliant, until at last the whole surface was lit up with an almost 
unearthly splendor. 

And still I am well aware that I do not yet fully understand 
this book. Neither do I expect ever to understand it entirely, 
though I learn something more about it almost every day, and 
shall probably go on reading it as long as I live. I doubt whether 
I fully understand any part of it. For the more it is studied the 
more profound it is seen to be, stretching out vista beyond vista 
apparently interminably. Now it may seem strange that any 
person should go on reading a book he could not understand, 
and, consequently, could in the ordinary way take no interest. 
The explanation is that there is the same peculiar magnetism 
about Leaves of Grass as about Walt Whitman himself, so that 
people who once really begin to read it and get into the range 
of its attraction, must go on reading it whether they compre- 
hend it or not, or until they do comprehend it. As Walt Whit- 
man says: 

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me ? 
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour. 
My words itch at your ears till you understand them. 

But after all, granting that this is true, is it worth while to read 
any book for years on the mere chance of understanding it at 
last? Certainly it would not be worth while with many books, 
but I will answer for it that no one who reads Leaves of Grass 
so as to understand it at all will ever repent the time and pains. 
For this is not a book that merely amuses or instructs. It does 
neither of these in the ordinary sense, but it does far more than 
amuse or instruct. It is capable of making whoever wishes to be 
so, wiser, happier, better ; and it does these not by acting on the 



Analysis of his Poetry. 177 

intellect, by telling us what is best for us, what we ought to do 
and avoid doing, and the like, but by acting directly on the 
moral nature itself, and elevating and purifying that. Why is 
this book so hard to understand ? In the first place it is worth 
while to notice that the author of Leaves of Grass was himself 
well aware of this difficulty, as he says in the two following and 
in many other places : 

But these leaves conning you con at peril, 

For these leaves and me you will not understand, 

They will elude you at first, and still more afterward, I will certainly elude 

you, 
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold 1 
Already you see I have escaped from you. 

Then in the lines "To a Certain Civilian:' 

Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me ? 

Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes? 

Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow ? 

Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand — nor am I 

now; 
(I have been born of the same as the war was born. 
The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music — I love well the martial 

dirge, 
With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral;) 
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I ? therefore leave my works, 
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes, 
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me. 

Are we to conclude that Walt Whitman wished and intended 
his writings to be difficult of comprehension? I do not think so 
at all. I think he would gladly have every one comprehend him 
at once if possible. Must we suppose then that he had not the 
ability to so write as to make himself easily intelligible? that in 
fact he is deficient in the faculty of clear expression ? On the 
contrary I should say that Walt Whitman is a supreme master of 
the art of expression. In a case like this there is soine one else 
besides the poet who may be to blame, and perhaps the fault 
may lie with — the reader. Must we say then that ordinary men, 
or even able men (for many of these have tried to read Leaves 



i;S IVii/t Whitman. 

of Grass and failed), have not sufficient intelligence to compre- 
hend the book ? No, I neither say nor believe this. 

The fact is, in the ordinary sense, there is nothing to under- 
stand about Leaves of Grass which any person of average intelli- 
gence could not comprehend with the greatest ease. The secret 
of the difficulty is, that the work, different from every popular 
book of poetry known, appeals almost entirely to the moral 
nature, and hardly at all to the intellect — that to understand it 
means putting oneself in emotional, and not simply mental rela- 
tion with its author — means to thoroughly realize Walt Whitman 
— to be in sympathy with the heart and mind of perhaps the 
most advanced nature the world has yet produced. This, of 
course, is neither simple nor easy. Leaves of Grass is a picture 
of the world as seen from the standpoint of the highest moral 
elevation yet reached. It is at the same time an exposition of 
this highest moral nature itself. The real difficulty is for an 
ordinary person to rise to this spiritual altitude. Whoever can 
do so, even momentarily, or in imagination, will never cease to 
thank the man by whose aid this was accomplished. It is such 
assistance which Walt Whitman is destined to give to large 
sections of the human race, and doubtless it is this which he 
refers to in the following passages : 

I am ho bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs, 
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help. 

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, 
When I give I give myself. 

I bring what you much need yet always have. 

Not money, amours, dress, eating, erudition, but as good, 

I send no agent or medium, olTer no representative of value, but offer the value 

itself. 

For I mvself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman. 
For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of the uni- 
verse. 

Now, in the mouth of any man known to history, with very few 
exceptions, these claims would be ludicrous. They would not, 
however, have been ludicrous if we suppose them made by such 



Analysis of his Poetry, 179 

men as Siddhartha Guatama, Confucius, Zoroaster, or Moham- 
med, for these men did as far as it was possible in their times and 
lands what Walt Whitman in these verses promises to do now, — 
that is, they bestowed their own higher natures upon all who 
came under their influence, gave them the help they most needed, 
and opened to them (the best gift of all) the way to a higher 
spiritual life. They made such claims, and fulfilled them. Walt 
Whitman too makes them. Can he fulfil them? I say he has 
done so, and that he will do so throughout the future. 

But let us examine this question and these claims a little more 
in detail, and see what they really mean. Whoever will consider 
them will see that they all amount essentially to the same thing, 
which is a promise on Walt Whitman's part to bestow upon any 
person who asks it, and who will put his or her mind in full re- 
lation with the poems, moral elevation. In other words, he will 
give to such person a greater amount of faith, a greater power 
of affection, and will consequently reduce in that person the lia- 
bility to, and the capacity of, fear and hate. Now, love and faith 
are the elements of which happiness is composed, and hate and 
fear (their opposites) are the elements of which unhappiness is 
composed. If, therefore, Walt Whitman can produce in us moral 
elevation, he will increase our true happiness, and this, to my 
mind, is the most valuable of all the "gifts of the universe," so 
far, at all events, as we know at present. Again : modern 
science has made it capable of proof that this universe is so 
constructed as to justify on our part love and faith, and not 
hate and fear. For this reason, the man who has in his com- 
position the most love and faith, and the least hate and fear, 
will stand (other things being equal) in the closest relation to 
universal truth, — that is, he will be the wisest man. If, then, 
Walt Whitman gives us moral elevation, he will also give wisdom, 
which, it seems to me, is clearly another of the chief "gifts of 
the universe." Yet once more : conduct flows from moral nature. 
The man with a low moral nature who is full of hate and fear, 
and the compounds of these, such as envy and jealousy, cannot 
possibly live a beneficent and happy life. On the other hand, 



l8o Wa/^ Whitman. 

it is inconceivable that the man who is full of love and faith 
should, on the whole, live a bad life. So that moral elevation, 
besides giving us happiness and wisdom, gives us also the power 
and inclination to lead good lives; and this, I should say, is an- 
other "gift of the universe" really worth having, in contradis- 
tinction to mere wealth, education, social position, or fame, 
which the current standards make the main objects of existence. 

Let us not forget that of all mental qualities, exceptional 
moral elevation is the hardest to see. So true is this, that in 
the whole history of our race, as far back as it is known, every 
man, without one exception, who has stood prominently in 
advance of and above his age by this quality, has not only not 
been considered exceptionally good, but has been in every in- 
stance looked upon by the majority of his contemporaries as a 
bad man, and has been consequently traduced, banished, burned, 
poisoned, or crucified. 

In philosophy, science, art, religion, men's views, their ways of 
looking at things, are constantly altering. And it is equally plain 
that on the whole they are altering for the better — are constantly 
acquiring a more just and worthy mental attitude towards their 
surroundings, towards each other, and towards Nature. This 
progress necessitates the constant abandonment of old ideas, and 
the constant taking up of new intellectual and moral positions. 
These successive readjustments are always the cause of more or 
less social, political, and literary disturbance. The antagonism 
is naturally deeper and stronger in the case of religious and social 
changes than new departures in science, philosophy, or art, since 
in religious tenets the feelings are more deeply involved. The 
men who initiate such readjustments of the soul of man to its 
environment are the master minds of the race. These are the 
men Walt Whitman calls Poets. He, says : " The true Poet is 
not the follower of beauty, but the august master of beauty." 
That is to say, he does not take merely the matter recognized as 
beautiful already and make it the theme of his verse, or amuse 
himself and his readers by dressing it up and admiring and prais- 
ing it. This, in the language of Leaves of Grass, is the office of 
a " singer," not of a " Poet ;" to do this is to be a follower of 



Analysis of Ids Poetry. 1 8 1 

beauty. But the Poet is the master of beauty, and his mastery 
consists in commanding and causing things which were not be- 
fore considered beautiful to become so. How does he do this? 
Before this question can be answered we must understand why 
one thing is beautiful to us and another not — why persons, com- 
binations, etc., that are beautiful to one are often not so to an- 
other — and why one man sees so much beauty in the world, 
another so little. The explanation is, that beauty and love are 
correlatives; they are the objective and subjective aspects of the 
same thing. Beauty has no existence apart from love, and love 
has no existence apart from beauty. Beauty is the shadow of love 
thrown upon the outer world. We do not love a person or thing 
because the person or thing is beautiful, but whatever we love, 
that is beautiful to us, and whatever we do not love, is not beau- 
tiful. And the function of the true Poet is to love and appre- 
ciate all things, nationalities, laws, combinations, individuals. 
He alone illustrates the sublime reality and ideality of that verse 
of Genesis, how God after His entire creation looked forth, 
"and pronounced it all good." A parallel statement would be 
true of Faith. As that which is seen from without inwards is love, 
and seen from within outwards is beauty, so that which seen 
from without inwards is faith, is goodness when seen from within 
outwards. 

The human race began by fearing or distrusting nearly every- 
thing, and trusting almost nothing; and this is yet the condition 
of savages. But from time to time, men arose who distrusted and 
feared less and less. These men have always been considered 
impious by those about them ; but for all that, they have been 
the saviors and progressists of the race, and have been recognized 
as such when their views and feelings penetrated the generations 
succeeding them. Such evolution has always been going on, 
and will continue. So far, fear has been a part of every accepted 
religion, and it is still taught that to destroy fear is to destroy 
religion. But if faith is to increase, fear, its opposite, must con- 
tinually decrease and at last disappear. Fear is the basis of 
superstition. Faith, its opposite, along with love, is the basis of 



1 82 Wa/f Whitman, 

religion. I know it is still said by some to-day in the name of 
religion, that men should hate this and that — sin for instance, 
and the devil, and that they should fear certain things, such as 
God and the Judgment. But this really is irreligion, not re- 
ligion. 

An important feature of Leaves of Grass is what I would call 
its continuity or endlessness. It does not teach something, and 
rest there. It does not make, in morals and religion, an import- 
ant step in advance, and stop satisfied with that. It has unlimited 
vista. It clears the way ahead, with allowance and provision for 
new advances far, far beyond anything contained in itself. It 
brings no one to " a terminus," nor teaches any one to be "con- 
tent and full." It is a ceaseless goad, a never-resting spur. To 
those to whom it speaks, it cries continually, forward ! forward ! 
and admits of no pause in the race. A second trait is its uni- 
versality. There is nothing of which humanity has experience 
that it does not touch upon more or less directly. There must 
have been a deliberate intention on the part of the author to give 
the book this all-embracing character, and no doubt that was one 
reason for the catalogues of objects in a few of the poems which 
have so irritated the critics. I have often tried to think of some- 
thing objective or subjective, material or immaterial, that was 
not taken cognizance of by Leaves of Grass, but always failed. 
A third feature is the manner in which the author avoids (either 
of set purpose, or more likely by a sure instinct) dealing speci- 
fically with any topics of mere class or ephemeral interest 
(though he really treats these too through the bases upon which 
they rest), and concerns himself solely with the elementary 
subjects of human life, which must necessarily have perennial 
interest. 

Leaves of Grass is curiously a different book to each reader. 
To some, its merit consists in the keen thought which pierces to 
the kernel of things — or a perpetual and sunny cheeriness, in 
which respect it is the synonyme of pure air and health ; to 
others it is chiefly valuable as being full of pictorial suggestions; 
to a third class of men it is a new Gospel containing fresh reve- 



Herald of a new Religions Era. 183 

lations of divine truth ; to a fourth it is charged with ideas 
and suggestions in practical life and manners ; to some its large, 
sv/eet, clear, animal physiology is its especial charm; to some, 
the strange abysses of its fervid emotions.* Upon still others 
(on whom it produces its full effect), it exerts an irresistible and 
divine power, strengthening and elevating their lives unspeak- 
ably, driving them from all meanness and toward all good, giving 
them no rest, but compelling them to watch every act, word, 
thought, feeling — to guard their days and nights from weakness, 
baseness, littleness, or impurity — at the same time giving them 
extraordinary power to accomplish these ends. 

There is still another class (altogether the most numerous so 
far), who see in the book nothing of all these fine things or good 
uses. To them it suggests contempt for laws and social forms, 
appears coarse, prosaic, senseless, full of impure ideas, and as 
seeking the destruction of religion, and all that is decent in 
human life. If men were really, as theologians tell us, inclined 
by Nature to evil, I could imagine Leaves of Grass might on 
the whole do some serious harm. But since, as I think is cer- 
tainly the case, (for who would not rather be healthy than sick? 
loved than hated ? happy than wretched ?) humanity on the whole 
is far more disposed to good than evil, there is no question that 
whatever stimulates and encourages the native growth and inde- 
pendent vigor of the mind, as it does, must in the final result be 
beneficial. 

Leaves of Grass belongs to a religious era not yet reached, of 
which it is the revealer and herald. Toward that higher social 
and moral level the race was inevitably tending — and thither, 
even without such an avant-courier, it would still eventually 
have reached. This book, however, will be of incalculable as- 
sistance in the ascent. As John Burroughs has suggested, it 
may have to wait to be authoritatively assigned to literature's 

* The London "Nineteenth Century" (December, 1882), in the course of an article on 
Walt Whitman, says, " He has a power of passionate expression, of strong and simple utter- 
ance of the deepest tones of grief, which is almost or altogether without its counterpart in the 
world." 



1 84 ^Va/t Whitman, 

highest rank, first by the lawgivers of the Old World, before 
America really acknowledges her own offspring in Walt Whit- 
man's work.* With the incoming moral state to which it be- 
longs, certain cherished social and religious forms and usages are 
incompatible ; hence the deep instinctive aversion and dread 
with which it is regarded by the ultra-conventional and con- 
servative. Just so, in their far-back times, was Zoroastrianism, 
Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, and every new birth 
received. Our whole theory of property, of individual owner- 
ship (for example) is by implication condemned by the spirit 
of the book, and when its level is reached, our present ideas 
and practice in this department will seem as backward and outr6 
as the ownership and transfer of one man by another seems 
to us now. So also our church-going, bible-reading, creeds, 
and prayers, will appear from its vantage-ground mere make-be- 
lieves of religion, hollow shells whose kernels have long since 
imperceptibly mouldered into dust. So does one birth of Time 
succeed another. So is it still as ever true that the gods are de- 
voured by their own children — that what the deepest and holiest 
heart-throbs of the race have brought into being, is again succes- 
sively overwhelmed and destroyed by the legitimate offspring of 
those same spiritual impulses. 

Every marked rise in the moral nature, when it has become 
diffused over broad sections of the race, necessitates and inspires 
as its accompaniment, new manners, new social forms, new poli- 
tics, new. philosophies, new literatures, and above all, new reli- 
gious forms. For moral elevation is the mainspring of all these, 
and of the world's progress — the rising tide upon which float all 
the fleets and argosies, as well as all the driftwood and foam, 

* The London " Nineteenth Century " of December, 1882, already alluded to, says : " The 
mass of his countrymen were not and are not strong enough to accept him. They have perhaps 
too httle confidence in their own literary originality to appreciate duly one from among 
themselves who breaks through all the conventional usages of literature ; they have too much 
squeamish delicacy to admit to their society one who is so brutally outspoken and unrefined. 
It is necessary perhaps that this writer, for we need not be zealous to claim for him the title 
of poet, should be first accepted in the Old World before he can be recognized by the New, 
which at present can see nothing in literature but by reflected light. Strange irony of fate, 
if such should be the destiny of one who cast off" the conventional forms, in order to free him- 
self and his country from Old- World influences 1" 



His poems "the Bible of Democracy.'' 185 

the ascending sap which vitalizes all the fruit of human life. 
Leaves of Grass is the initiative of such a rise, the preface and 
creator of a new era. This old world has seen many such new 
departures, and is to see many more before it is done. They 
have always been begun by one man, embodying what suspends 
in nebulous forms through the humanity of the time, and from 
him have spread more or less over the earth's surface. And for 
their basis these movements have had invariably, since the inven- 
tion of writing, and in some instances before that time, a book, to 
embody themselves and radiate from. Leaves of Grass is such 
a book. What the Vedas were to Brahmanism, the Law and the 
Prophets to Judaism, the Avesta and Zend to Zoroastrianism, 
the Kings to Confucianism and Taoism, the Pitakas to Buddhism, 
the Gospels and Pauline writings to Christianity, the Quran to 
Mohammedanism, will Leaves of Grass be to the future of Amer- 
ican civilization. Those were all Gospels; they all brought good 
news to man, fitting his case at the period, each in its way and 
degree. They were all " hard sayings " and the rankest heresy 
at first, just as Leaves of Grass is now. By and by it too will be 
received, and in the course of a i^v^ hundred years, more or less, 
do its work and become commonplace like the rest. Then new 
Gospels will be written upon a still higher plane. 

In the mean time, Leaves of Grass is the bible of Democracy, 
containing the highest exemplar of life yet furnished, and suited 
to the present age and to America. Within it is folded (as the 
oak in the acorn, or the man in the new-born babe} a new spirit- 
ual life for myriads of men and women. 

Very few people have any conception what such books are to 
those who first receive them — what enthusiasm and devotion 
they inspire — what reckless abandonment to the new feeling of 
spiritual exaltation they kindle — how they absorb all life, and 
make the old worldly interests poor and contemptible — how they 
light up new joys, and end by placing existence on a higher 
plane. As few to-day realize this, though they have heard and 
read of it all their lives, so no one, except those who have felt 
it, can realize what Leaves of Grass is to the first men and women 
who experience its power. 

16 



1 86 Wa/t Whitman. 

Then from a merely literary, technical, pictorial point of view, 
where else are so depicted in living words the complex storms of 
action in the midst of which we of the Nineteenth century live 
— the trains on the railways, the steam and sail ships and their 
cargoes, the myriads of factories, the interminable stretches of 
cultivated land, the towns and villages, with thousands of throb- 
bing lives — curious flashes of the life of wildest Nature (as in 
"The Man-of-war Bird "*) — the geography of the globe, the 
diverse races, circumstances, employments — fraternal love and 
fratricidal strife — the arming for the war, 1S61-65, the fields of 
battle, victory, defeat, the heaped burial trenches, the hospitals 
filled with mangled and maimed, the final disbandment of the 
soldiers — the scenery of a Continent, its rivers, lakes, bays, prai- 
ries, mountains, forests, the crags and ravines of Colorado and 
California, the vast fertile spread of the Prairie States, the snows 
and wildernesses of the North, the warm bayous and lagoons of 
the South, the great cities to the East — all the shows of the sea, 
of the sky, of the seasons — sexual passions, religious mystery, the 
records of the past, the facts of the present, the hopes of the 
future — the splendors of life, the equal splendors of death — all 
the speculations and imaginations of man, all the thoughts of his 
composite mind, all the visions of his dreaming soul, all the beats 
of his great heart, all the works of his giant hands — the seething 
crowds, the passionate longings of men and women everywhere, 
their fervor and their ceaseless striving, their intense egoism and 
equally intense sympathy, the attractions and repulsions that sway 
them from moment to moment, the contradictory forces that 
dwell in every soul, the passion and energy of the globe. For 
all these — not in polished literary descriptions, but with their 
own life and heat and action — make up Leaves of Grass. Its 
themes and treatment, so august, so complex (yet uniform), so 
tremendous, how curious it is to see the book sneered at for 
"want of form." Criticism of it from such point of view were 

* There is a bit of literary history about this piece. It was sent to the American maga- 
zines — first to " Scribner's," by whom it was returned with a contemptuous note from the 
principal editor. Then to, and rejected by, one after another of nearly all the principal 
monthlies. Then to London to the " Athenseum," promptly accepted, paid for, and pub- 
lished. 



He Exalts the Commonest Life. 187 

a senseless waste of time. Its form will be unprecedently beau- 
tiful to all who know its spirit, and to those who do not, it is a 
matter of no consequence. The function of first-class works is 
not to follow forms already instituted, but to institute new forms. 
"He who would achieve the greatest production of art," said 
Voltaire, "must be the pupil of his own genius." The language 
in which a book is written will never finally save or condemn it ; 
only the soul of the book counts, nothing else is of any lasting con- 
sequence. The three first Gospels were chit-fly written by quite 
illiterate people, and they have no pretensions at all to " style." 
St. Paul's epistles were written in very bad Greek, and had per- 
haps still less pretension to mere literary excellence. But in those 
books lived and through them shone the Soul of a Divine Man. 
How many hundred tons of classically correct poems, essays, 
speeches, letters, and dramas have they outlived ! and how many 
will they still outlive ! Walt Whitman will endure, not as having 
reached or conformed to any existing standard, but as having set 
one up. 

Other first-class poets possess a mental scope and grandeur 
that dwarf ordinary humanity, and intimate existences higher 
than those of earth. They excite in us admiration and wonder, 
give us glimpses of celestial beauty and joy, but leave us in- 
trinsically as we were — or perhaps fill us with pain at our own 
inherent littleness. While no reader of Leaves of Grass (once 
entering their meaning and influence) fails to absorb every piece, 
every page, every line, as intensely his — how strangely different, 
in their effect, the hitherto accepted poems ! We revel amid 
the beauty, fulness, majesty and art, of the plots and personages 
of the "Iliad," "Odyssey," or "y^Sneid," or in Shakespeare's 
immortal plays, or Spenser or Milton, or " La Legendes des 
Siecles," or Goethe's masterpieces, or Tennyson's "Idyls." 
With them the reader passes his time as in sumptuous dreams 
or feasts, far from this miserable every-day world, man's actual 
and vulgar experience, one's own sphere. He enjoys those in- 
comparable works like some sweet, and deep, and beautiful in- 
toxication. But a mortifying and meagre consciousness inva- 
riably follows. Not for him the stage where Achilles and 



1 88 IVa/t Whitman. 

Coriolanus and Lancelot so grandly tread. He himself dwin- 
dles to a mere nothing in comparison with such exceptional 
types of humanity. However sjilendid the pageant and the 
shows of the march, a latent humiliation brings up the rear. 
Was it not time one should arise to show that a few selected 
warriors and heroes of the past, even the gods, have not mo- 
nopolized and devoured (nay, have hardly entered into) the 
grandeur of the universe, or of life and action, or of poems? 
arise to "shake out," for common readers, farmers, mechanics, 
laborers, "carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet 
been heard upon the earth " ? Well did Thoreau, after reading 
and visiting Walt Whitman, hit the centre of the matter by ex- 
claiming "He is Democracy.^' For what possible service in that 
department so great as to practically demonstrate to each of 
the countless mass of common lives that its scope and sphere 
are as divine, as heroic, as illuminated, as "eligible," as any? 
As pure air, wholesome food, clear water, sunshine, pass into 
and become the life of the body, so do these Lem'cs interpene- 
trate and nourish the soul that is fitted to receive them. The 
others stand outside our identity; this poet comes within, and 
interfuses and incorporates his life with each of us. We share 
his health, strength, savage freedom, fierce self-assertion, fearless- 
ness, tamelessness. We take part in his large, rugged humanity, 
his tender love and steadfast faith. The others are for hours of 
clearness and calm. He suits equally well (perhaps better) with 
worry, hard work, illness, and affliction. Every-day lives, com- 
mon employments, become illustrious. For you, "whoever you 
are," the past has been, the present exists, and the future will 
exist. 

A word, (I ought to have given it farther back) as to the 
curious catalogue character, so hesitatingly dwelt on by not a 
few — even by Emerson. The latter wrote to Carlyle, sending 
him an early Leaves of Grass, in 1856: "If, on reading, you 
think its pages the catalogue of an auctioneer, you can light your 
pipe with them." The book is doubtless open to a charge of 
the kind. Only it is as if the primary Creator were the *•' auc- 
tioneer," and the spirit in which the lists are made out is the 



A Tliought, reading the Biblic Poems. 189 

motif of all vitality, all form. Or, a new Adam, in a modern and 
more complex Paradise, here gives names to everything — to me- 
chanics' trades, tools — to our own days, and their commonest 
objects. 

In still hours, reading the biblic poems of the ages, and en- 
tirely possessed with them, flits through the brain the phantom 
thought that in the impalpable atmosphere of those poems' ex- 
pression and endeavor, man's ultimata are involved; and all the 
rest, however multitudinous, is only preparation and accessory. 

I have been so occupied with the features portrayed through 
the preceding pages that I have said nothing on a point, or series, 
partly personal, by no means least in giving character to Walt 
Whitman and his works. His position in the history of his 
country is a peculiar one. Receiving the traditions of Washing- 
ton from men who had seen and talked with that great chieftain 
— of the old Revolutionary War from those who had been part 
of it — as a little boy, held in the arms of Lafayette, and his 
childish lips warmly pressed with a kiss from the French warrior 
— his youth passed amid the scenes and reminiscences of the 
gloomy Battle of Brooklyn — the direct memories of that whole 
contest, of the adoption of the American Constitution, of the 
close of the last century, and of Jefferson, Adams, Paine, and 
Hamilton, saturating, as it were, his early years — he brings on 
and connects that receding time with the Civil War of i86i-'65 
— with the persons and events of our own age — with Lincoln, 
Grant, Sherman, Lee, the Emancipation Proclamation, the fights 
around Richmond, and the surrender at Appomattox. Then, 
the Secession War over, he merges it, or at least the spirit of it, 
in oblivion. The brotherhood of the States re-united, now in- 
dissolubly, he chants a tender and equal sorrow for the Southern 
as for the Northern dead — in one of his last utterances passion- 
ately invoking the Muse, through himself, in their behalf: 

Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain, 

That I exhale love from me wherever I go, like a moist perennial dew, 

For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North. 



IQO JV(i/f Mliitman. 

Until a long period elapses few will know what the pages 
of L^aiYs <y" Grass bestow on America. Granting all its un- 
precedented thrift and material power, the question arises to 
serious inquiry, Is the New World Republic actually a success on 
any but lower grounds? Is there not, to its heart-action and 
blood-circulation to-day, a profound danger, a pervading lack of 
something to be supplied, without wliich its richest and amplest 
fruits will continually turn to ashes? It is in response to such 
inquiry, and supply to such deficiency (or rather to suggest 
the means of every man supplying it within himself, and as part 
of himself) I consider Walt Whitman's life and poems un- 
speakably important. 



APPENDIX 

TO PART II. 



CONTEMPORANEOUS NOTICES 

1855 TO i883. 



(191) 



SELECTIONS FROM CONTEMPORANEOUS CRITI- 
CISMS, LETTERS, NEWSPAPER NOTICES, ETC, 
AMERICAN AND FOREIGN 

To recover what was distinctively said of any important past event or 
person, at the time of his or its advent — what the wise ones had to predict 
— would it not indeed afford lessons of the deepest, sometimes of an un- 
questionably comic, significance ? Judgments formed of men by their con- 
temporaries have also a certain interest apart from their individual truth or 
falsity; for it was true at least that such things were thought of the man. 
Considered in this way, the opinions about Walt Whitman have a value, and, 
as I think, a great value, in the estimation of his character. At any rate, 
there is the refracted light — and future ages may estimate no more powerful 
one — which a majority of the criticisms of the Nineteenth century on Leaves 
of Grass pour over the criticisers themselves, and the society and times whose 
impressions they utter. 

One thing to be remarked, on the least attempt at massing the collection, 
is the extent and number of European notices of the poems and their author, 
often at great length and much detail, contrasted by comparative silence in 
leading American quarters, the monthlies and quarterlies. About all the atten- 
tion to the book during the last two years, from these latter authorities (though 
the newspaper press has been copious), consists, for example, in this precious 
judgment of three lines, at the close of its critical Budget in " Harper's 
Monthly," January, 1882, describing the final edition of the poems as "a con- 
geries of bizarre rhapsodies that are neither sane verse nor intelligible prose, 
by Walt Whitman, entitled Leaves of Grass." In the British Islands and 
cities, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, the poet has a far more settled status, 
if not more appreciative readers, than in his own country. The " London 
Times," in its mention of him, while it does not indorse or eulogize his 
works, always speaks of him with entire respect, admitting that he is the only 
American poet, native and democratic. Though not yet popularly read 
on the European continent, he is often noticed, welcomed, sometimes trans- 
lated, in German, Hungarian, Danish, and Italian periodicals. The Russian 
" Zagranitschuy Viestnik" (Foreign Messenger), St. Petersburg monthly, in 
one of its 1882 numbers, has a long article on American literature, nearly a 
quarter being devoted to high and appreciative aomme-nts on Leaves of Grass 

17 ( ^9Z ) 



194 Appendix to Part II. 

and its author. For the guidance of those who may desire to further pursue 
this branch of inquiry, I give a list of some of these past and late statements 
and sources : 



Leaves of Grass Imprints. Thayer & Eldridge. Boston, iS6o. 64 pages, 
i6mo. 

Notes on WaU Whitman as Poet and Person. By John Burroughs. Sec- 
ond edition. 126 pages, l2mo. J. S. Redfield. New York, 1S71. 

Walt Whitman. " Revue des Deux Mondes." Paris, June I, 1872. By Th. 
Bentzon. 

Walt Whitman, the Poet of Joy. By Arthur Clive. •' Gentleman's Maga- 
zine." London, December, 1875. 

The Poetry of Democracy : Walt Whitman. " Studies in Literature." By 
Prof. Edward Dowdcn. London, 1S7S. 

The Flight of the Eagle. " Birds and Poets." By John Burroughs. Bos- 
ton : Houghton & Kliinin, 1S78. 

Walt Wliitman. " Scribner's Monthly." New York, November, 1880. By 
Eilmund Clarence Stedman. 

W'alt Whitman. " Buster og Masker." By Rudolf Schmidt. Copenhagen, 
1S82. 

Walt Whitman. " Nineteenth Centuiy." London, December, 1882. By G. 
C. Macaulay. 

Walt Whitman. " Sonntagsblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung." Decem- 
ber, 1882. Three numbers. By Dr. Karl Knortz. 

Regarding the excerpts that follow, it will be seen at the first glance that their 
verdicts, both pro and con, are of the very strongest. How can such extremely 
contradictory opinions and feelings be explained ? Perhaps it is best to let 
each find a solution for himself, or simply leave the whole matter to be settled 
by time. One thing may, however, be said, that if Walt Whitman is really 
the sort of man and poet his opponents say, it would be impossible to account 
for the feeling entertained and the view taken by his disciples. On the other 
hand, if his friends arc right in their estimation of him, there is no difficulty 
at all in accounting both for the intense antipathy felt toward the man and 
the falsehoods circulated about him, and for the extreme hostility with which 
Leaves of Grass has been received. Then a fact of no small significance : 
It is plain to those who have watched the currents and utterances excited by 
the poet and his works, that the opposition to them (though still strong and 
active, as it is no doubt best it should be) is steadily declining, while appre- 
ciation of both is broadening and deepening every day. 

The excerpts are collected at random ; they are made more for the future 
than the present. To have been exact, the objurgatory notices ought to have 
occupied three-fourths of the collection. I give enough, however, to show 
the animus of all ; then devote the rest to further illustration of the idea and 
purpose out of which my book has arisen. 



Initials and Outlines — Brooklyn. 195 

From the Brooklyn " Daily Times,^^ September zg, iS^S- 

Walt Whitman, A Brooklyn Boy. Leaves of Grass: (a volume of 
Poems, just publisher!.) — To ^jive jurlj^ment on real fjoems, one needs an ac- 
count of the poet himself. Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, 
will appear these new poems, the Lcmies of Grass ; an attemj^t, as they are, 
of live, nai've, masculine, tenderly affectionate, rovdyish, contemplative, 
sensual, moral, suscejitible and imfjerious person, to cast into literature not 
only his own fjrit and arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, 
regardless of foreign models, regardless of modesty or law, and ignorant or 
.silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except his own presence and experi- 
ence, and all outside of the fiercely love<l land of his birth, and the birth of 
his parents and their parents for several generations before him. I'oliteness 
this man has none, and regulation he has none. The effects he produces are 
no effects of arti.sts or the arts, but effects of the original eye or arm, or the 
actual atmosphere or grass or brute or bird. You may feel the unconscious 
teaching of the presence of some fine animal, but will never feel the teaching 
of the fine writer or siK-aker. 

Olher poets celebrate great events, personages, romances, wars, loves, pas- 
sions, the victories and power of their country, or some real or imagined 
incident — and pcjlish their work, and come to conclusions, and satisfy the 
reader. This poet celebrates himself, and that is tlie way he celebrates all. 
He comes to no conclusions, and does nc)t satisfy the reader. He certainly 
leaves him what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of the tree 
of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be eraseil again. 

What good is it to argue about egotism ? There can be no two thoughts on 
Walt Whitman's egotism. That is what he steps out of the crowd and turns 
and faces them for. Mark, critics ! for otherwise is not used for you the key 
that leads to the use of the other keys to this well-enveloped yet terribly in 
earnest man. His whole work, his life, manners, friendships, writing, all 
have among their leading purposes an evident purpose, as strong and avowed 
as any of the rest, to stamp a new type of character, namely his own, and 
indelibly fix it and publish it, not for a model but an illustration, for the present 
and future of American letters and American young men, for the South the 
same as the North, and for the Pacific and Mississippi country, and Wis- 
consin anfl Texas and Canada and Havana, just as much as New York and 
Boston. Whatever is needed toward this achievement he puts his hand to, 
and lets imputations lake their time to die. 

First be yourself what you would show in your poem — such seems to be 
this man's example and inferred rebuke to the schools of poets. He makes 
no allusions to books or writers; their spirits do not seem to have touched 
him ; he has not a word to say for or against them, or their theories or ways. 
He never offers others; what he continually offers is the man whom our 
Brooklynites know so well. Of American breed, of reckless health, his body 
perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dys- 
pepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder, never once using medicine, 
drinking water only — a swimmer in the river or bay or by the seashore — of 
straight attitude and slow movement of foot — an indescribable style evincing 
indifference and disdain — ample limbed, weight a hunrlred and eighty-five 
pounds, age thirty-six years [1855] — never dressed in black, always dressed 
freely and clean in strong clothes, neck open, shirt-collar flat and broad, 
countenance of swarthy transparent red, beard short and well mottled with 
white, hair like hay after it has been mowed in the field and lies tossed and 
streaked — face not refined or intellectual, but calm and wholesome — a face 
of an unaffected animal — a face that absorbs the sunshine and meets savage 



196 Appendix to Part IT. 

or gentleman on equal terms — a face of one who eats and drinl^s and is a 
brawny lover and embracer — a face of undying:; friondsliip and indulgence 
toward men and women, and of one who tinds the same returned man)' fold 
— a face with two gray eyes where passion and hauteur sleep, and melancholy 
stands liehind them — a spirit that mixes cheerfully w ith ihe world— a pei^son 
sin.;ularly belo\ ed and welcomed, especially by yming men and mechanics — 
one who has tuin aliachments there, and associates tliere — one wlio does not 
associate with literary and elegant people — one of the two men sauntering 
along the street with their arms over each other's shouldeis, his companion 
some boatman or ship-joiner, or from the hunting-tent or hunber-raft — one 
who has that quality of attracting the best out of people that they present to 
him none of their meaner and stingier traits, but always their sweete>t and 
most generous traits — a man never calleil upon to make speeches at public 
dinners, never on platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or professors, or 
aldermen, or Congressmen — rather ilow n in the bay w ith pilots in their pilot 
boats — or otl" on a cruise with ti.shcrs in a tisinng smack — or with a band of 
laughers and roughs in the streets of the city or the open grounds of the 
country — fond of New York and Brooklyn — fond of the life of the wharves 
and the great ferries, or along Broadway, observing the endless wonders of 
that thoroughfare of the world — one wliom, if you would meet, you neetl not 
expect to meet an extraordinary person — one in whom you wid see the singu- 
larity whicli consists in no singularity — whose contact is no dazzling fascina- 
tion, nor requires any deference, but has the easy fascinatitin of what is 
homely and accustomed — of sometiiing you knew before, and was waiting for 
— of naiural pleasures, and well-known places, ami welcome familiar laces — 
perhaps of a remembrance of your brother or mother, or friend away or dead 
— there you have Walt Whitman, the begetter of a new otTspring out of litera- 
ture, taking with easy nonchalance llie chances of its present reception, and, 
through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future recep- 
tion. 

From " The Critic," London, En^tand, iSjJ. 

We should have passed over this book, Lt-avts of Grass, with indignant 
contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics attempted to " fix" this Walt 
Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature to 
America — who shall form a race of poets as Banquo's issue formed a line of 
kings. Is it possilde that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a 
poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? We hope not; and yet there 
is a probability, and we will show why, that this Walt Whitman will not meet 
with the stern rebuke which he so richly ileserves. America has felt, oftener 
perhaps than we have ileclared, that she has no national poet — that each one 
of her children of song has relied too much on European inspirations, and 
clung too fervently to the old conventionalities. It is therefore not unlikely 
that she may believe in the dawn of a thoroughly original literatui'e, now there 
has arisen a man who scorns the Hellenic deities, who has no belief in, perhaps 
because he has no knowledge of. Homer and Shakespeare; wdio relies on his 
own rugged nature, and trusts to his own rugged language, being himself 
what he siiows in his poems, t^nce transfix him as the genesis of a new era, 
and the manner of the man may be forgiven or forgotten. But what claim has 
this Walt Whitman to be thus consiilereil, or to be considered a poet at all ? 
We grant freely enough that he has a strong relish for Nature and freedom, 
just as an animal has; nay, further, that his crude mind is capable of appre- 
ciating some of Nature's beauties; but it by no means follows that, because 



1856 — Emerson to Carlyle. 1 97 

Nature is excellent, therefore art is contemptible. Walt Whitman is as unac- 
f|uaiiitc(l with art, as a hog is with mathematics. liis poems — we must call 
them so for convenience — twelve in numljer, are innocent of rhythm, and 
resemble notliing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians. Indeed, Walt 
Whitman has had near and atnjjle ojtportunities of studyinj^ the vociferations 
of a few amiable savages. i)r rather, perhajrs, this Walt Whitman rtmindi 
us of Caliban flinging down his logs, and setting himself to write a poem, in 
fact, Caliban, and not Walt Whitman, might have written tliis: 

I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable, 

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 

Is this man with the "barbaric yawp" to push Longfellow into the shade 
and he meanwhile to stand and " make mouths" at the sun? The chance of 
this might be formidable were it not ridiculous. That object or that act which 
most devehjps the ridiculous element carries in its bosom the seeds of decay, 
and is wholly jjowerless to trample out of God's universe one spark of the 
beautiful. We do not, then, fear this Walt Whitman, who gives us slang in 
the j)lace of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. The flepth of 
his indecencies will be the grave of his fame, or ought to be, if all proper 
feeling is not extinct. The very nature of this man's compositions excludes 
us from proving by extracts the truth of our remarks; but we, who are not 
prudish, emphatically declare that the man who wrote jjage 79 of the Leaves 
of Grass deseives nothing so richly as the fmblic executioner's whip. Walt 
Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the 
true utterance of a man : we, who may have been misdirected by civilization, 
call it the exjiression of a beast. 



From the New York " Criterion" A^ovember 10, i8j^. 

Thus, then, we leave this gathering of muck to the laws which, certainly, 
if they fulfil their intent, must have power t<j supjjrcss such obscenity. As it is 
entirely destitute of wit, there is no probability that any would, after this ex- 
posure, read it in the hope of finding that; and we trust no one will require 
further evidence, for, indeed, we do not believe there is a newspaper so ^ile 
that would print confirmatory extracts. 

In our allusions to this book, we have found it impossible to convey any, 
even the most faint idea of its style and contents, and of our disgust and de- 
testation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears 
polite; but it does seem that some one should, under circumstances like these, 
unrlertake a most disagreeable yet stern duty. The records of crime show 
that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their 
vileness was attended with too great indelicacy. 

Emerson to Carlyle, 18^6. 

One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster, 
which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisj^ulably Amer- 
ican—which I thought to send you ; but the book throve so badly with the few 
to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet 
I believe now again, I shall. It is called Leaves of Grass — was written and 
printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New York, named Walter 
Whitman ; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that 
it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe 
with it. — Letters published i88j. 



198 Appendix to Part II. 

From the Boston " Intelligencer," May j, 18^6. 

We were attracted by the very singular title of the work to seek the work 
itself, and what we thought ridiculous in the title is eclipsed in the pages of 
this heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense. The 
beastliness of the author is set forth in his own description of himself, and 
we can conceive no better reward than the lash for such a violation of decency 
as we have before us. Speaking of "this mass of stupid filth," the "Crite- 
rion" says: " It is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy could have 
conceived it, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey 
that had died of disappointed love." This book should find no place where 
humanity urges any claim to respect, and the author should be kicked from 
all decent society as below the level of the brute. There is neither wit nor 
method in his disjointed babbling, and H seems to us he must be some escaped 
lunatic raving in pitiable delirium. 

From " Fow-teen Thotisand Miles Afoot" i8^g. 

Nothing can more clearly demonstrate the innate vulgarity of our American 
people, their radical immodesty, their internal licentiousness, their unchastity 
of heart, their foulness of feelings, than the tabooing of Walt Whitman's 
Leaves of Grass. It is quite impossible to find a publisher for the new edi- 
tion which has long since been ready for the press, so measureless is the de- 
pravity of public taste. There is not an indecent word, an immodest expres- 
sion, in the entire volume; not a suggestion which is not purity itself ; and 
yet it is rejected on account of its indecency ! So much do I think of this 
work by the healthiest and most original poet America has produced, so' valu- 
able a means is it of rightly estimating character, that I have been accustomed 
to try with it of what quality was the virtue my friends possessed. How few 
stood the test I shall not say. Some did, and praised it beyond measure. 
These I set down without hesitation as radically pure, as " born again," and 
fitted for the society of heaven and the angels. And this test I would recom- 
mend to every one. Would you, reader, male or female, ascertain if you be 
actually modest, innocent, pure-minded ? read the Leaves of Grass. If you 
find nothing improper there, you are one of the virtuous and pure. If, on the 
contrary, you find your sense of decency shocked, then is that sense of de- 
cency an exceedingly foul one, and you, man or woman, a very vulgar, dirty 
person. 

The atmosphere of the Leaves of Grass is as sweet as that of a hay-field. 
Its pages exhale the fragrance of Nature. It takes you back to man's pristine 
state of innocence in Paradise, and lifts you Godwards. It is the healthiest 
book, morally, this century has produced ; and if it were reprinted in the form 
of a cheap tract, and scattered broadcast over the land, put into the hands of 
youth, and into the hands of men and women everywhere, it would do more 
towards elevating our nature, towards eradicating this foul, vulgar, licentious, 
sham modesty which so degrades our people now, than any other means 
within my knowledge. What we want is not outward, but inward modesty; 
not external, but internal virtue; not silk and broadcloth decency, but a de- 
cency infused into every organ of the body and faculty of the soul. Is mod- 
esty a virtue ? Is it then worn in clotfies? Does it hang over the shoulders, 
or does it live and breathe in the heart ? Our modesty is a Jewish phylactery, 
sewed up in the padding of a coat, and stitched into a woman's stays. 



The "Imprints" of i860. 199 

Frotn the Brooklyn "City News^'' October loth, i860. 

Leaves of Grass Imprints. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, Publishers. 
— In this little supplement (a sort of wake after the ship) appear to be gath- 
ered a portion of those notices, reviews, etc. (especially the condemnatory 
ones), that have followed the successive issues of Walt Whitman's Leaves of 
Grass. The history of that composition, so far, is curious. It has already 
had three births, or successive issues. The first poems consisted of a thin 
quarto volume of 96 pages, in Brooklyn, in 1855. It comprised eleven pieces, 
and was received with derision by the literary lawgivers. The only excep- 
tion was a note from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1857 a second issue, a very 
neat l6mo volume of 384 pages, was published in New York, containing 
thirty-two poems. The third issue, containing, large and small, one hundred 
and fifty-four poems, superbly printed (it is indeed universally pronounced, 
here and in England, a perfect specimen of choice typography), came forth 
in Boston the current year, i860. 

Such is the book to which this curious collection of criticisms refers. The 
poem itself (for Leaves of Grass all have a compact unity) may be described, 
in short terms, as the Song of the sovereignty of One's self — and the Song of 
entire faith in all that Nature is, universal and particular — and in all that be- 
longs to a man, body and soul. The egotistical outset, " I celebrate myself," 
and which runs in spirit through so much of the volume, speaks for him or 
her reading it precisely the same as for the author, and is invariably to be so 
applied. Thus the book is a gospel of self-assertion and self-reliance for 
every American reader — which is the same as saying it is the gospel of De- 
mocracy. 

A man "in perfect health " here comes forward, devoting his life to the expe- 
riment of singing the New World in a New Song — not only new in spirit, but 
new in letter, in form. To him America means not at all a second edition, 
an adaptation of Europe — not content with a new theory and practice of poli- 
tics only— but above its politics, and more important than they, inaugurating 
new and infinitely more generous and comprehensive theories of Sociology, 
Literature, Religion, and Comradeship. 

We therefore do not wonder at the general howl vfit\i which these poems 
have been received both in America and in Europe. The truth about the 
book and its author is, that they both of them confound and contradict several 
of the most cherished of the old and hitherto accepted canons upon the right 
manner and matter of men and books— and cannot be judged thereby; — but 
aim to establish new canons, and can only be judged by them. Just the same 
as America itself does, and can only be judged. 

Neither can the song oi Leaves of Grass ever be judged by the intellect — 
nor suffice to be read merely once or so, for amusement. This strange song ( often 
offensive to the intellect) is to be felt, absorbed by the soul. It is to be dwelt 
upon — returned to, again and again. It wants a broad space to turn in, like 
a big ship. Many readers will be perplexed and baffled by it at first; but in 
frequent cases those who liked the book least at first will take it closest to their 
hearts upon a second or third perusal. A peculiar native idiomatic flavor is 
in it, to many disagreeable. There is no denying, indeed, that an essential 
quality it takes from its author, is (as has been charged) the quality of the 
celebrated New York " rough," full of muscular and excessively virile energy, 
full of animal blood, masterful, striding to the front rank, allowing none to 
walk before him, full of rudeness and recklessness, talking and acting his 
own way, utterly regardless of other people's ways. 

The cry of indecency against Leaves of Grass amounts, when plainly 
stated, about to this : Other writers assume that the sexual relations are shame- 



200 Appendix to Part IT. 

ful in themselves, and not to be put in poems. But our new bard assumes 
that those very relations are the most beautiful and pure and divine of any — 
and in that way he " celebrates " them. No wonder he confounds the ortho- 
dox. Yet his indecency is the ever-recurring indecency of the inspired Bib- 
lical writers — and is that of innocent youth, and of the natural and untainted 
man in all ages. In other words, the only explanation the reader needs to 
bear in mind to clear up the whole matter is this : The subjects about which 
such a storm has been raised, are treated by Walt Whitman with unprece- 
dented boldness and candor, but always in the very highest religious and es- 
thetic spirit. Filthy to others, to /lim they are not filthy, but " illustrious." 
While his "critics" (carefully minding never to state the foregoing fact, 
though it is stamped all over the book) consider those subjects in Leaves of 
Grass from the point of view of persons standing on the lowest animal and 
infidelistic platform. Which, then, is really the "beast"? 

Tfiose who really know Walt Whitman will be amused beyond measure at 
the personal statements put forth about him in some of these criticisms. We 
believe it was Dr. Dictionary Johnson who said that persons of any celebrity 
may calculate how much truth there is in histories and written lives, by weigh- 
ing the amount of that article in the stuff that is printed or gossiped about 
themselves. 

From " The Cosmopolite^'' Boston, August 4th, i860. 

In no other modern poems do we find such a lavish outpouring of wealth. 
It is as if, in the midst of a crowd of literati bringing handfuls of jewels, a 
few of pure metal elaborately wrought, but the rest merely pretty specimens 
of pinchbeck, suddenly a herculean fellow should come along with an entire 
gold mine. Right and left he scatters the glittering dust, — and it is but dust 
in the eyes of those who look only for pleasing trinkets. Out of his deep 
Californian sacks, mingled with native quartz and sand, he empties the yellow 
ore, — sufficient to set up fifty small practical jewellers dealing in galvanized 
ware, if they were not too much alarmed at the miner's rough garb to ap- 
proach and help themselves. Down from his capacious pockets tumble 
astonishing nuggets, — but we, who are accustomed to see the stuff never in its 
rude state, but only in fashionable shapes of breastpins or caneheads, start 
back with affriglit, and scream for our toes. 

It is much to be regretted that treasures of such rare value are lost to the 
age through the strange form and manner in which they are presented. But 
it is time lost blaming the miner. Perhaps he could have done differently, 
perhaps not; at all events, we must take him as he is, and, if we are wise, 
make the best of him. 

The first and greatest objection brought against Walt Whitman and his 
Leaves of Grass is their indecency. Nature is treated here without fig-leaves; 
things are called by their names, without any apparent sense of modesty or 
shame. Of this peculiarity — so shocking in an artificial era — the dainty reader 
should be especially warned. But it is a mistake to infer that the book is on 
this account necessarily immoral. It is the poet's design, not to entice to the 
perversion of Nature, which is vice, but to lead us back to Nature, which in 
his theory is the only virtue. His theory may be wrong, and the manner in 
which he carries it out repulsive, but no one who reads and understands him 
will question the sincerity of his motives, however much may be doubted the 
wisdom of attempting in this way to restore mankind to the days of un- 
draped innocence. 

In respect of plain speaking, and in most respects, the Leaves more re- 



A Boston Critic "at a loss." 20I 

semble the Hebrew Scriptures than do any other modern writings. The style 
is wonderfully idiomatic and graphic. The commonest daily objects and the 
most exalted truths of the soul, this bard of Nature touches with the ease 
and freedom of a great master. He wonders at all things, he sympathizes 
with all things and with all men. The nameless something which makes the 
power and spirit of music, of poetry, of all art, throbs and whirls under and 
through his verse, affecting us we know not how, agitating and ravishing the 
soul. And this springs so genuinely from the inmost nature of the man, that 
it always appears singularly in keeping even with that extravagant egotism, 
and with those surprisingly quaint or common expressions, at which readers 
are at first inclined only to laugh. In his frenzy, in the fire of his inspiration, 
are fused and poured out together elements hitherto considered antagonistic 
in poetry,— passion, arrogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility, rowdy- 
ism, spirituality, laugliter, tears, together with the most ardent and tender love, 
the most comprehensive human sympathy which ever radiated its divine glow 
through the pages of poems. 

From the "Boston Post,^' i860. 

We have alluded just now to our incapability of comprehending the writ- 
ings of Swedenborg, but still more, in some parts, do we acknowledge our- 
selves nonplussed and puzzled by these Leaves of Grass. It would be more cor- 
rect, however, to say how utterly at a loss we are to understand by what motive 
or impulse so eminent a lecturer and writer, and, as we have always under- 
stood, with all his crotchety ideas and pantheistic prattlings, so pure-minded 
a man as R. Waldo Emerson could have written that eulogy of the Leaves, 
Vi'hich certainly acted as our chief inducement for inspecting their structure. 

Grass is the gift of God for the healthy sustenance of his creatures, and its 
name ought not to be desecrated by being so improperly bestowed upon these 
foul and rank leaves of the ppison-plants of egotism, irreverence, and of lust 
run rampant and holding high revel m its shame! 

We see that the volume arrogantly assumes to itself the claim of founding 
an original and independent American Literature. Woe and shame for the 
Land of Liberty if its liternture's stream is thus to flow from the filthy foun- 
tain of licentious corruption! Little fear, however, should we have of such 
an issue from the Leaves themselves. The pure and elevated moral sense of 
America would leave them to decay and perish amid their own putridity. But 
there is danger of their corrupting influences being diffused and extended to 
the great injury of society, when leaders of our literature, like Emerson, are 
so infatuated in judgment, and so untrue to the most solemn responsibilities 
of their position, as to indorse such a prurient and polluted work ; — to ad- 
dress its author in such terms as these, " I give you joy of your free and 
brave thought — I have great joy in it — I \\ ish to see my benefactor." 

The most charitable conclusion at which we can arrive is, that both Whit- 
man's Leaves and Emerson's laudation had a common origin in temporary 
insanity ! 

It in no degree shakes our judgment to find more than one eminent Review 
coinciding more or less in the praise of this work, to which we ourselves hy 
no means deny the possession of much originality of thought and vigor of 
expression. No amount, however, of such merits can, in the judgment of 
sound and honest criticism, — whose bounden duty it is to endeavor to guide 
the mind of the nation in a healthy, moral course — ^ atone for the exulting auda- 
city of Priapus worshiping obscenity, which marks a large portion of the vol- 
ume. Its vaunted manliness and independence, tested by the standard of a 



202 Appctidix to Part IT. 

truthful judgment, is nothing but the deification of Self, and defiance of the 
I3t;ity J — its liberty is the wildest license ; its love the essence of the lowest lust 1 

From the Cincinnati " Commc-nia/," iS6o. 
Perhaps our readei-s are blissfully ignorant of the history and achievements 
of Mr. Walt Whitman. Be it known, tlien, that he is a native and resident of 
Brooklyn, Long Island, born and bred in an obscurity from which it were well 
he never had emerged. A person of coarse nature, and strong, rude passions, 
he has passed his life in culiivating, not the amenities, but the rutlenesses of 
character; and instead of tempering his native ferocity with the delicate inllu- 
enccs of art and retined literature, he has stmiieil to exaggerate its deformities, 
and to thrust into his composition all the brute force he could muster from a 
capacity not naturally sterile in the elements of strength. He has umlertaken 
to be an artist, without learning the first principles of art, anifhas presumed to 
put forth " poems," without possessing a spark of the poetic faculty. I le affects 
swagger and independence, and blurts out his vulgar impertinence under a full 
assurance of "originality." 

From the London "Literary Gazette,^^ y"b' 7^^t i860. 
Of all tlie writers we have ever perused Walt Whitman is the most silly, 
the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting. If we can think of any 
stronger epithets we will print them in a second edition. 

Fromthe "Allgemtiiie Zcitung" {Augsburg.) Ma;/ 10, 1868. 

aSalt sa^bitmait. 

2.HMI iVfvtiuaiit' <v veil tjU" lit (;. 

SK>aIt 'JT^Wtman I ai'cv i|t ^ilnilt ^livlntnian ? 

ric '.Jhitivovt i?aiitct: cm ricttcr! Oiiii nnicr amcn'faitifdbcv 'Ttdbtcr! 
(Efiiic "in'ivuiitcrrr faticn : tcr crftf, t>cr cin^iiK rkttfr ivcliltcu '.Jlnicvifa biv<bcr 
lifv\.Hn-;ifl.'v.u1n. Xcr fin.^iiK fpcdftfd) amcvifauifdic riditcv, M'ciii *Ji^tiiMcr tit 
ten iiii»<iH'tvfti'ncn ^Jvuvcit ^cr cunH^'iitdicu '?Jiii|'c, nciii, frifdi von tcv yvaivic iinl> 
ben '^InilfMuniicn, friid) von tcr Miiftc tint ten lU'ofu'ii Aliiltcii, fvi|cl) luiv* tfiii 
^iii-nultciiiimnihl tcr .'pafcn m\t tcr vjtattc, frifcl) von ten ^^^diliulttfiitcvn tc»5 
Siitcni<, Kit iivtjicntit tci^ 'i^otcu»<, tcv ihn iic^^ciuit, in -^aav iint i^avt un^ .Mlfit'- 
crn ; cin nodi nidit raiimn-fencr, fin fcfi nnt> bcanifst nnf ten fijicncn anifvifan- 
tibcn 'i\iif!cn >5tfbcntfr, cin tirof;c riniu sivojj, ivrnuiuul) oft fcUMnt, 'inn-fiinbcn- 
bcr. tint ivcitfv nod) iichcn tit i^ctmint-cvcr : ilvilt '.JlMntnian tft ilmcn bcv cin^ijie 
Tid'tcr iibcvtian).'t in wcUlicm bic ^cit, tic fvcifu'nC'C, viniKUtc, fndjcnbc ;^cit, 
tbrcn '^Inobvucf iicfuntcu Iwt ; tcr 'I?icl)tcr par excellence; tcr riditcr — 
"llic poet." 

5o, anf ter cincn Scitc tic iPcwnntcvcr, in tcvcn JRcilicn, nn^ foivu cin 
Gmcvfon bc;K;Utet; anf tcr antcrn tann fvcilid) tic J^atlcv, tie .<>crabwurti(U'r. 
9icl'cn tern umicmcffcncn Vobc, tfv bciict|tcvtcn 3l»crfcnnung tcr btttcrc, tcr bci^- 
cntc 5pott, tic fviiinffntc \5d)nialiuna. 

rai? frcih* fiimntcvt ten riditcr nidit. Tax? Job nimnit crbin ali< cin ibm 
flclnihvcntci* ; tcr 'i^evadttunt'i fciu er tic 'i'cvacljlunii entiiCiKn. Oir jilaitbt an fid), 
feiu 5elbft)icfiil)l ift nnbe.ivan^t. „^x tft" ifa.U fi'in cnidifdier >'ncraiiv^iU'bcr, 
SB. W. jKoffcttii „VHn- alien felbft tcv ct n c DJiann, weldicr tic ernftc UcberjeniKU 
\)(i[t unt befennt taf) er, jcut nnt in ;^ufnnft, tcr (shiinter einev nenen poctilcbcn 
{*iieratuv iff — eincv luoficn Vitevatnr — cinrv I'itcratur line fie jin tcr inateriellen 
6hof)c unt ten nnbered)fnbaven (ikfd)icfcn '.?lincvifa'i< im 'InMbaltniti ftebt." lir 
(llaubt tap tcr tSoliinibui? tci* c£-vttbciU^ otcr tcr 3lvifhtiiiiton ter i^ctaaten nid)t 
Wabr^aftiijev cin (i^riintcr nnt ^lufcrbancr ticfcsJ iUnicrifaV^ flcwcfcn ift alij ft 



Criticism by Freiligrath. 203 

fflbfl in 3wfu"f' ««"fr f^')" '^•'^^- ''^^ch>i§ «<«« er^abftte Ueberjeuflung, unb bom 
Xic^tcr infbr nl^ finmni in prad^tif^cn SBorten au0gef)5roct)m — feint )jrac()tiger 
alo taiS (yfC>icljt Wfici)C0 mit Dcr ;}ciie bfflinnt: 

...ttunimt, uiiaiiflrelid; ft-iU id) ticfc« ^efilaiit mad)cn." 

Xas flinflt ftolj. jft bfr 'Wann in fcincm JKcdjte fo \\\ reben? Jrctcn wir 
f()m nabcr ! -^bren toir i^on fcincm I'cben unb fcincm S-ctjaffcn ! Scljlagcn tuir 
jiicrft fcin SOucl) auf ! 

Sinb baa i^crfc ;" "Zxt ,3f>'f" f'"^ *>"'« S3erfe abgefc^t, aUerbinfl^, rtbcr 9?frfe 
finb C0 nid)t. Mciu 'iJictrum, fcin 3{eim, fcine Strci^bcn. 9?l)t)tt)miicl)e ^'rof"/ 
Strcrfycric. 3luf ben crftcn Vliiblirf raui), ungcfiig, formlo;? ; rtbcr tcnnod), fiir 
cin fcincrck5 £)l)r, bci5 UBobKauta nid)t crnianficlnb. Xic '2prnd;c fd)lid)t, bcrb, 
flraccjju, atlciS ling bcim red;tcn y^amcn ncnncnb, bor nid^ta ;iuriirf|'d)rccfcnb, 
mandjmal tunfcl. Xcr Ion r()apfobifc^, prop()ctcnbaff, oft unglcid;, bae (frl;a- 
bcne mit bcm fycn)bl)nlid;cn, bii* i\x\ <ycfd)niacflofigfeit fogar, t)cvmifd;enb. (ir 
erinncrt une juiccilcn, bci alicr fonftigen iikrfdjicDculjeit, an unfcrn .^^amnnn, obcr 
an (£nr(ylc'0 Draftiwciebfit, otcr an bie J'arolcs d'un (Jroyant. %\x<i altcm 
{jcrauei flingt bic ii^ibcl — ibrc 2prnc^c, nic^t i()r cyiaubc. 

Unb n)a>5 triiflt un5 bcr X id^tcr in bicfcr ^orm cor ;" 3w""rf'f^ f'rf^ ff't'ft/ ffin 
3d'/ 2Balt aiU)itman. Xicfc^ jd) abcr ift cin Iljcil con Vimcrifa, cin 2l)ei( bcr 
Grbc, cin Ibcil bcr 9J?cnfd)t)cit, cin Il)cil bcs ^iilla. UII0 fold;fn fitbit er fid), unb 
rollt, baei ''yrii§tc ans Mlcinitc fniipfcnb, immcr con 5(mcrifa aui?gct)cnb unb immcr 
hjictcr auf Stmcrifa iiuriidfommcnb (nur cinem frcicn iColfc gct^iirt bic^ufnnftlj, 
ein (jrofartigce JBcItpanorama cor una auf. Xurdt) bicfcs jnbicibiium si^alt 
2Bf)itman unb fcincn ^iimcrifaniemua flcbt, wir mbc^ten fagcn, ein foemifd)tt 
3uji, icic cr finnenbcn f^ciftcrn eigncn mag, bie, ter nncnt(id)fcit gegcniiber, cin- 
fame Xage am (^ycftabe bea ^JJiccra, cinfame y^ac^tc untcr bcm gcftirnten -tiimmel 
bcr ^.Prairie ccrbradjt baben. ttr finbet fid) in atlcm unb allca in fid). (£r, ber 
einc gj^enfd) ai^alt aiUjitman, ift bic Wcnfd)()cit unb bie ai^elt. llnb bic SBelt unb 
bie 5)icnfd)beit finb ibm e i n gropca f^cbidit. 2Bne cr ficl)t unb bbrt, toaa er be- 
riit)rt, »aa immcr aw ibn berantritt, aud)bae 9?icbrigftc, baa (^^cringftc, baa Sttltag- 
(i(tfte — atlee ift ibm 2t)mbol einca -^bbercn, einca ^yeiftigen. £)berciclmcl}r: bie 
?l!JJatcrie unb bcr fiJeift, cie 20irflic^fcit unb baa jceal finb it)m cina unb baafelbe. 
(So, burd) fic^ felbft gcroorbcn, ftcl}t cr ba ; fo fc^rcitct cr fingcub einber ; fo erfd,iiefit 
er, ein fto(;;cr freier Wenjd;, unb n ur cin ^JJenfd;, tccltnjeite fociale unb politifcpe 
5)crfpecticcn. 

C£inc munberbare (Srfdjcinung! 2Bir geftet)en ba§ fie un^ ergreift, ung be= 
unrubigt, una nidjt loa Kipt. ^wglcid) abcr merfen tcir an ba^ tcir mit 
unfcrm Urtbcil iibcr fie nod) nic^t fcrtig, ba§ tcir noct) com crften (£inbrutf be» 
fangen fint. Untcrbeffcn woUen n?ir, mabrfc^cinlic^ bic crften in I cutfuilanb, 
njcnigftcna corlaufig iMct ncbmcn com Xafci)n unb wirfcn bicfcr frifd)en .Uraft. 
(2ic ccrbicnt ba^ unferc XtdUcr unb Xcnfcr fid) ben fcltfamcn neucn (^ycnoffen 
nat)er anfeben, bcr unferc gefammte Arspoctifa, bcr cSk unfcre afti)ctifd;cn IbCD= 
rien unb Mancne iibcr ben -taufcn \\\ tccrfcn brobt. 3n bcr 2bnt/ tccnn wir wi 
bicfe ernften ^Matter bincingebord)t baben, iccnn una baa ttcfc coUtonige itSraufen 
bicfrr wie WcercawcUcn in ununtcrbrodjcncr i^otgc auf una cinftiirmcnbcn rbap= 
fobifd)cn (^ycfoRc certraut gctcorbcn ift, fo Xi'\!^ unfer berfomm(id)fa i'erfcmad)fn, 
unfer 3'^^'i"9f" ^^^ ''ycbanfena in irgcnbwc(d»c iiberfommcne J^ormcn, unfer 
Spiclcn mit Mling unb .Ulang, unfer 2ilben;^al)Icn unb Silbcrmcffcn, unfer 
Soncttircn unb 2tropt)en= unb Stanjenbauen una faft finbifc^ bebiinfen. Sinb 
wir wirflid) auf bcm ^unft angelangt wo baa i!eben, aucfe in bcr ^'ccfie, ncue 
SiugbrucfcWcifcn gcbictcrifd) ccrlangt? -^at bic 3fit fo cicl unb fo bcbcutcnbea \Xi. 
fagcn, ba^ bic altcn cycfafic fiir ben neucn jnbalt nid)t mc^r auercid)fn V '2tc[)en 
wir cor einer .-Jufunftapocfic wie un? fcbon feit jabren cine .-{ufunftSmufif cer- 
fiinbigt wirb '? Unb ift iffialt SBbitman mcl)r ales 3iic|)arb 2i3agncr 'i 



204 Appendix to Part H. 

From '* The Radical^" Boston, Ma\\ iS/O. 

A Woman's Estimate oi- Walt Whitman. — By Mrs. Gilchrist, England, 
in a letter to W. M. K. " 

.... I had not dre.\med that words could cc.tse to be words, and become 
electric streams like these. 1 do assure you th.it. strong as I am, I t'cel some- 
times as if I had not Ixulily strength to read many of tliese poems. In the series 
headed "Calamus," for instance, in some of the "Songs of Parting," the 
"Voice out of the Sea,"* the poem begini\ing " Tears, Teai-s," etc., there 
is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses 
to heat under it, — stands quite still, — and 1 am obliged to lay the book down 
for a while. (Dr again, in tlie piece called •* Walt Whitman,"! -^'i*' ^^"'-" ^^^ ^^^'^ 
othei"s of tliat type, I am as one hurried through storniv seas, over high moun- 
tains, dazed with sunlight, stunned w ith a crowd and tumult of faces anil voices, 
till I am breathless, bewildered, half dead. Then come parts and wliole poems 
in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful 
breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened. 
Living impulses tlow out of these that make me exult in life, yet look long- 
ingly toward "the superb vistas of Death." Those who admire this poem, 
and don't care for that, and talk of formlessness, absence of metre, etc., are 
quite as far from any genuine recognition of Walt Whitman as his bitter de- 
tractoi-s. Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, 
but that all are vital ; they grew — they were not made. We criticise a palace 
or a cathedral ; but what is the good of criticising a forest ? Are not tlie 
hitherto-accepted masterpieces of literature akin rather to noble architecture; 
built up of material rendered precious by elaboration ; planned with subtile 
art, that makes beauty go hand-in-hand with rule and measure, and knows 
where the last stone will come before the first is laid ; the result stately, lixed, 
yet such as might, in every particular, have been ditVerent from what it is 
(therefore inviting criticism), contrasting proudly w ith the careless freedom of 
Nature — oj>posing its own rigid adherence to symmetry to her \\ilful dallying 
with it? But not such is this book. .*^eeils brought by the winds from 
north, south, east, and west, lying long in the earth, not resting on it like the 
stately buikling, but hid in it and assimilating it, shooting uj^wards to be nour- 
ished by the air and the sunshine and tiie rain which beat idly against th.at, — 
each bough and twig and leaf growing in strength and beauty its own way, a 
law to itself, yet with all this freedom of spontaneous growth, the result in- 
evitable, unalterable (therefore setting criticism at naught) — above all tilings, 
vital — that is, a source of ever-generating vitality: such are these poems. 

I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; 

and that this rusliing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters 
of metre. But I know that the music is there, and that 1 would not for some- 
thing change ears willi those who cannot hear it. And I know that poetry 
must do one of two things, — either own this man as equal with her higliest, 
completest manifcstors, or stand aside, and admit that there is something come 
into the world nobler, diviner than herself, one thai is free of the universe, and 
can tell its secrets as none before. I do not think or believe this, but see it 
with the same unmistakable definiteness of perception and full consciousness 
that I see the sun at this moment in the noonday sky, and feel his rays glowing 
down upon me as I write in the open air. Wliat more can you ask of the words 

* " Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." f " Song ot Myself." 



Letter of Mrs. Gilchrist, England. 205 

of a man's mouth than t!ial tliey shouM "absorb into yrju as foofl an'] air, to 
appear aj^ain in your strcn^.'.th, gait, face," — that they should be " filjre and filter 
to your blood," joy and gladness to your whole nature ? 

1 am persuaded that one great source of this kindling, vitalizing power — I 
suppose eke great s<jurce — is the grasp laid ujjon the present, the fearless and 
conijjrehensive dealing with reality. Hitherto the leaders of thought have 
(except in science) been men with their faces resolutely turned backwards; 
rn'.n who have made of the past a tyrant that beggars and scorns the present, 
hardly seeing any greatness but what is shrouded away in the twilight, under- 
ground past; naming the present only for disjiaraging cornjjarisons, humilia- 
ting distrust that tends to cre;it<: the very barrenness it complains of; bidding 
me warm myself at fires that went out to mortal eyes centurii;s ago; in-isting, 
in religion above all, that I must either " look through dead men's eyes," or 
shut my own in helj^less darkness. Poets fancying themselves so happy over 
the chill and faded beauty f^f the past, but not making me happy at all — 
rebellious always at being rlragged down out of the free air and sunshine of 
to-day. Hut this jKjet, llii-> "athlete, full of rich words, full of joy," takes 
you by the hand and turns you with your face straight forwards. 'Ihe present 
is great enough for hirn, because he is great enough for it. It flows through 
him as a " vast oceanic tide " lifiing up a mighty voice. Earth, " the clofjuent, 
dumb, great mother," is not old, has lost none of her fresh charms, none of 
her divine meanings ; still bears great sons and daughters, if only they would 
j>ossess themselves an<l accept their birtliright — a richer, not a poorer, heritage 
than was ever provided before — richer by all the toil and suffering of the gen- 
erations that have preceded, and by the further unfolding of the eternal pur- 
jioses. Here is one cornc al last wlio can show thcrn how ; wh'fse songs are 
the breath of a glad, strong, beautiful life, nourished sufficiently, kindled to 
unsurpassed intensity and greatness by the gifts of the present. 

You argued rightly that my confidence would not be betrayed by any of the 
poems in this book. None of them troubled me even for a moment; because 
I saw at a glance that it was not, as men had sujjposed, the heights brought 
flown to the depths, but the dei»ths lifted up level with the sunlit heights, that 
they might jjccome clear and sunlit too. Always, for a woman, a ved woven 
out of her own soul — never touchcl upon even with a rough hand, by this 
jjoet. But, for a man, a daring, fearless jjrifle in himself, not a mock modesty 
woven out of delusions — a very poor imitation of a woman's. Do they not 
see that this fearless pride, this complete accej>tance of themselves, is needful 
for her jjride, her justification ? What ! is it all so ignoble, so base, that it 
will not bear the honest light of speech from \\\)s so gifteri with "the divine 
power to use words"? Then what hateful, bitter humiliation for her, to 
have to give herself up to the reality ! Do you think there is ever a bride 
who does not taste more or less this bitterness in her cup? But who put it 
there ? It must surely be man's fault, not God's, that she has to say to herself, 
" Soul, look another way — you have no part in this. Motherhood is beauti- 
ful, fatherhood is beautiful; but the dawn of fatherhood and motherhood is 
not beautiful." Do they really think that God is ashamed of what He has 
made and appointed ? And, if not, surely it is somewhat superfluous that they 
should undertake to be so for Him. 

" The full spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul" 

of a woman above all. It is true that instinct of silence I spoke of is a 
beautiful, imijerishable part of Nature too. But it is not beautiful when it 
means an ignominious shame brooding darkly. .Shame is like a very flexible 



2o6 Appendix to Part IT. 

veil, that follows faithfully the shape of what it covers — beautiful when it 
hides a beautiful thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. It has not covered 
what was beautiful here; it has covered a mean distrust of a man's self and 
of his Creator. It was needed that this silence, this evil spell, should for 
once be broken, and the daylight let in, that the dark cloud lying under might 
be scattered to the winds. It was needed that one who could here indicate 
for us " the path between reality and the soul " should speak. That is what 
these beautiful, despised poems, the " Children of Adam," do, read by the light 
that glows out of the rest of the volume : light of a clear, strong faith in God, 
of an unfathomably deep and tender love for humanity — light shed out of a 
soul that is " possessed of itself." 

" Natural life of me faithfully praising things, 
" Corroborating forever the wiumph of things." 

Now silence may brood again ; but lovingly, happily, as protecting what is 
beautiful, not as hiding what is unbeautiful : consciously enfolding a sweet 
and sacred mystery—august even as the mystery of Death, the dawn as the 
setting; kindred grandeurs, which to eyes that are opened shed a hallowing 
beauty on all that surrounds and preludes them. 

" O vast and well-veiled Death ! 

" O the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons." 

He who can thus look with fearlessness at the beauty of Death may well dare 
to teach us to look with fearless, untroubled eyes at the perfect beauty of Love 
in all its appointed realizations. Now none need turn away their thoughts 
with pain or shame ; though only lovers and poets may say what they will — 
the lover to his own, the poet to all, because all are in a sense his own. None 
need fear that this will be harmful to the woman. How should there be such 
a flaw in the scheme of creation that, for the two with whom there is no com- 
plete life, save in closest sympathy, perfect union, what is natural and happy 
for the one should be baneful to the other? The utmost faithful freedom of 
speech, such as there is in these poems, creates in her no thought or feeling 
that shuns the light of heaven, none that are not as innocent and serenely fair 
as the flowers that grow; would lead, not to harm, but to such deep and 
tender affection as makes harm or the thought of harm simply impossible. 
Far more beautiful care than man is aware of has been taken in the making 
of her, to fit her to be his mate. God has taken such care that he need take 
none; none, that is, which consists in disguisement, insincerity, painful hush- 
mg-up of his true, grand, initiating nature. And, as regards the poet's utter- 
ances, which, it might be thought, however harmless in themselves, would 
prove harmful by falling into the hands of those for whom they are manifestly 
unsuitable; I believe that even here fear is needless. For her innocence is 
folded round with such thick folds of ignorance, till the right way and time 
for It to accept knowledge, that what is unsuitable is also unintelligible to her, 
and, if no dark shadow from without be cast on the white page by miscon- 
struction or by foolish mystery and hiding away of it, no hurt will ensue from 
its passing freely through her hands. This is so, though it is little understood 
or realized by men. Wives and mothers will learn through this poet that 
there is rejoicing grandeur and beauty there wherein their hearts have so 
longed to find it ; where foolish men, traitors to themselves, poorly compre- 
hending the grandeur of their own or the beauty of a woman's nature, have 
taken such pains to make her believe there was none — nothing but miserable 
discrepancy. 



A French Literary Opinion. 20/ 

From the " Revue des Deux Mondes" June i, 1872. By Th. Bentzon. 

{^Extracts.) 

Le mepris qu'il feprouvait pour le sentimentalisme elegant que les poetes 
de I'ecole de Tennyson ont mis en honneur, et qui pour lui n'etait qu'un ver- 
biage plus ou moins musical, resultat d'une vie de mollesse et d'enervement, 
— la haine de ce genre de litterature dont I'origine selon lui est feodale, d'une 
certaine distinction convenue, de ce qu'il appelle les fagons de la haute vie 
de bas-etage, — I'ambition enfin de creer une poesie Americaine proprement 
dite, en rapport avec I'immensite territorial et la grandeur des destinees du 
Nouveau-Monde, lui inspirerent cette oeuvre, qui eut un succ^s prodigieux en 
meme temps qu'elle suscita de formidables orages. Emerson n'a pas craint 
de designer Leaves of Grass comme le morceau le plus extraordinaire de sa- 
gesse et d'esprit qu'eut encore produit I'Amerique ! Sans doute la forme en 
est souvent negligee ou meme baroque. Si vous etes imbu de vieux pre- 
juges contre les poemes en prose, si vous tenez compte des lois de la versifi- 
cation, gardez vous de lire ce qu'ou a compare avec trop d'indulgence a la 
poesie de la Bible et a la prose rhythmee de Platon. L'auteur declare du 
reste rompre avec tous les precedens; atijourd'' hui, voila I'epreuve qui doit 
tenter le podte ! A quoi bon remonter dans la nuit des generations loin- 
taines? L'homme naturel, tel est son heros; les Etats-Unis sont en eux- 
memes le plus grand de tous les poemes. Walt Whitman enterre le passe : 
il chante I'avenir, I'Amerique et la liberte ; qu'on n'attende de lui rien de 
frivole vie de feminin. II se pique avant tout d'une herculeenne virilite. 

Ce qui nous parait aussi bizarre pour le moins que la philosophic et que la 
religion de M. Whitman, c'est sa morale. II n'admet pas le mal, ou plutot il 
juge que le mal et le bien se valent, puisque tous deux existent; il prend 
l'homme comme il est et soutient que rien ne pent etre mieux que ce qui est, 
si les appetits grossiers jouentun grand role, ce doit etre la condition neces- 
saire des choses, et nous devons I'accepter. Pourquoi dont ce qui se voit, ce 
que nous savons, ce qui est necessaire, par consecjuent juste, ne serait-il pas 
proclame dans ses vers ? Appuye sur de pareils sophismes, il n'y a point d'in- 
decence qui le fasse reculer; la langue frangaise refuserait a la traduction de 
certains morceaux erotiques. M. Walt Whitman n'admettant pas de differ- 
ence entre l'homme et la femme, ni meme entre la laideur et la beauts, ne 
peut employer le mot d'amour dans le sens ordinaire; ce mot il le prononce 
sans cesse, mais en I'appliquant indistinctement a tous les etres; I'amour, en- 
dehors d'une fraternite universelle, n'est pour lui que le plaisir physique ex- 
prime avec la erudite qui lui est propre. Aussi est il penible de I'entendre 
parler de la femme consideree autrement que comme mere et citoyenne. Le 
seul hommage, presque respectueux et tres eloquent d'ailleurs, qu'il lui rende 
dans toute son oeuvre, a pour cadre, le croirait-on, la morgue, et il s'agit d'une 
prostituee. En somme, une prostituee vaut-elle moins qu'une vierge ? 

L' Anglais, qu'il cel^bre emphatiquement comme la langue du progr^s, de la 
foi, de la liberte, de la justice, de I'egalite, de I'estime de soi, du sens com- • 
mun, de la prudence, de la revolution, du courage, et qui, selon lui, exprime 
presque I'ine primable, Tanglais devient sons sa plume un jargon barbare 
souvent incomprehensible. Encore si ses " Chants democratiques " ne pe- 
chaient que par la forme; mais le fond est plus detestable encore. 

On ne peut nier qu'il y ait la. une certaine grandeur et beaucoup de passion, 
Walt Whitman nous fait I'effect du sinistre oiseau de mere, au quel lui meme 
s'est compare, ses grandes ailes sombres ouvertes sur Tocean qui le separe de 



208 Appendix to Part II. 

I'ancien monde, et jetant au milieu des tempetes les cris de haine raques et 
stridens dont par malheur I'eclio a retenti chez nous. 

Walt Whitman excelle a decrire I'enthousiasme des recrues, I'embarque- 
ment des vieilles troupes qui arrivent de toute parts, convertes de poussiere, 
funiant de sueur, les tentes blanclies qui s'elevent dans le camp, les salves 
d'artillerie au lever de I'aurore, les marches precipitees sur des routes incon- 
ues, les haltes rapides sous le ciel nocturne passeme d'etoiles eternclles ; il 
excelle a mcttre en opposition le calnie immuable de la nature avec les fu- 
reeurs humaines a nous faire respirer " le parfum de la guerre." 

Un autre fois il nous conduit a I'ambulance, une ambulance improvisee 
dans la vieille eglise au fonri des hois; les lampes voltigent, dechirant I'oni- 
bre nciire d'une lueur rapide; une grande torche goudronnee, stationnaire, 
jette sa sauvage flamme rouge et des nuages de fumee sur les groupes con- 
fus, sur les formes vagues couchees par terre ou qui surchargent ies bancs. 
Le poete ne nous fait grace ni dc I'otleur du sang confondue avec celle de 
Tether, ni de la sueur des spasmes supremes, ni des eclairs qui jaillissent de 
I'instrument d'acier en train de iravailler les chairs en lambeaux ; il ecarte le 
couverture de laine qui couvre le visage des morts, il recueille le demi-sou- 
rire que lui adresse le jeune volontaire, un enfant, en exhalant son dernier 
souffle; il pense au Christ mort pour ses frere, le sentiment religieux et la 
divine pitie relevent la rudesse de ceitains details au point d'en faire une 
beaute de plus. Pour etre juste, il fandrait tout citer de ces eloquens et fa- 
rouches Roulemens de Tambour : — la Tonibe, la pauvre tombe du sol- 
dat, ignoree, perdue dans les bois de la Virginie, et que le poete, qui I'a ren- 
contree une fois, retrouve sans cesse sons ses pieds, au milieu des rues bru- 
yantes et des fetes de la vie ; — les Reves de guerre, qui nous transportent en 
plein carnage avec trop de musique imitative : sifHemens de balles, explosion 
d'obus; — le Camp, oil nous goutons un instant ce repos inquiet qui suit les 
marches forcees et precede la battaille ; — la I'isuin, qui ramene au milieu de 
la fusillade le veteran revenu au foyer, tandis qu' a I'heure de minnit il s'ac- 
coude sur I'oreiller de sa femme endormie, et que la douce respiration du 
baby s'eleve, retombe dans le silence. 

Nous voici loin des professions materialistes dont fourmillent telles pieces 
radicales que nous ne citions tout a I'heure qu' avec repugnance. Walt Whit- 
man se contredit singulierement, et on ne saurait s'en plaindre; il ne se ]5ique 
pas du reste d'etre consequent avec lui-meme. Les fanatiques pretendent 
que la faute en est a la multiplicite d'aspects que presentent les choses et a la 
prodigieuse capacite de Whitman pour tout sentir et tout comprendre, a son 
iiniversalile en un mot. Nous croyons plutot qu'il a reussi a ecrire des choses 
elevees et fortes le jour ou il s'est decide a glaner dans le champ fecnnd de 
I'observation, au lieu de se perdre dans de vaines utopies, des paradoxes in- 
senses et une philosophic malsaine dont il est loin d'etre I'invenleur, — le jour 
ou il s'est inspire du spectacle inepuisable de la vie humaine avec ses nobles 
emotions, ses jo'es pures et ses suffrances, au lieu de pretendre, comme il I'avait 
fait d'abord, a partager les sensations des choses, k s'assimiler aux lilas, au 
silex, aux nuages, aux agneaux, aux volailles de la basse-cour, voire au vieil 
ivrogne qui se traine en trebuchant hors de la taverne ! 

II est remarquable que, lorsque Whitman choisit bien ses sujets [as in 
" Drum Taps"] la forme est toujours plus correcte, ce qui prouve que la no- 
blesse de I'expression est inseparable de celle de la pensee. Le poeme lant 
vante de " Walt Whitman" ["Song of Myself"] nous ramene en pleine 
brutalite, en plein egoisme, en plein paradoxe. Nous y avous cependant re- 



From " Matador:' 



209 



cueilli une belle pensee qui nous fait esperer que le spiritualisme purifiera 
peut-etre un jour, si I'orgueil du poete de I'avenii- le permet, cette muse revo- 
lutionnaire qui I'a trop longtemps inspire. A la suite d'une comparaison entre 
la nuit et la mort, il s'ecrie : 

Je trouvais le jour plus beau que tout le reste, jusqu'4 ce que j'eusse contemple les beautes de 

ce qui n'est pas le jour. 
Je croyais que notre globe terrestre etait assez, jusqu'd ce que se fussent elevees sans bruit 

auLour de lui des myriades d'autres globes ; 
Je vois maintenant que la vie ne peut tout me montrer, de meme que le jour ne le peut, je 

vois que je dois attendre ce que me montrera la mort. 

Restons sur ces vers de bon augure. Sans admettre que le pretendu Chris- 
tophe Colomb de I'art Americain ait decouvert des regions jusqu' ici inex- 
plorees, on ne peut nier qu'il possede a un haut degre la passion, la verve 
patriotique et un salutaire mepris de la banalite ; mais que lui et ses iniitateurs 
(puis qu'il doit etre, helas ! le pere d'une longue generation de poetes) ces- 
sent de croire que la grossierete soit de la force, la bizarrerie de I'originalile, 
la licence une noble hardiesse. Qu'ils ne confondent pas I'obscurite du Ian- 
gage avec la profondeur, le cynisme avec la franchise, le vacarme avec la 
musique ;— qu'ils ne fassent pas appel k la haine, a I'envie, aux plus mauvais 
sentimens de Tame sous pretexte de la reveiller ; — qu'ils se degagent des 
inspirations factices qui feraient croire en les lisant a un mangeur de haschich 
ou a un de ces buveurs de whisky mele de poudre, comme il en existe, 
assure-t-on, dans quelques coins sauvages de leur patrie ; — qu'ils respectent 
la pudeur des femmes, puisqu'ils les placent, disent-ils, plus haut qu'elles 
n'ont jamais ete ;— qu'ils prennent une attitude plus digne que celle de 
boxeur; — qu'ils permettent au monde de les juger, au lieu de se juger eux- 
meme avec une si altiere con fiance en leur merite et leur destinees futures, 
avec un enivrement si comique de leur propre ])ersonnalite. Camarade ! crie 
Walt Whitman en terminant, apres des propheties qui prouvent qu'il croit 
ecrire un nouvel evangile, camarade, ceci n'es pas un livre .... Quiconque 
le touche louche un homme ! 



From the New York "Graphic,''' N'oveniber 2jth, 187J. — By Matador. 
(Extracts.) 

It takes seven years to learn to appreciate Walt Whitman's poetry. At 
least it took me precisely that time, and I divided it as follows .- For four 
years I ridiculed Leaves of Grass as the most intricate idiocy that ". prepos- 
terous pen had ever written. During the next two years I found myself oc- 
casionally wondering if, after all, there might not be some glimmer of poetic 
beauty in Whitman's ragged lines. And then during the last year of my 
Walt Whitman novitiate the grandeur and beauty and melody of his verse, 
its vast and measureless expression of all human thoughts and emotions, were 
suddenly revealed to me. I understand it now. I have learned its purpose 
and caught the subtle melody of its lines. 

Carelessly looked at, Leaves of Grass is a formless aggregation of lines 
without definite purpose and without the slightest pretence of prosody. Closer 
search shows the thread that guides one thrpugh the maze, and demonstrates 
its artistic plan. Whitman professes to express all the thoughts and feelings 
common to humanity, — whatever you or . I may have felt, whether in 
moments of joy or sorrow ; whatever you or I may have thought, whether 
it was true or false, honorable or shameful, our feelings and thoughts 
are expressed in this cosmical poem. It is this vastness of design that 
forbids the easy comprehension of the poem; that, permitting to the care- 

18 



210 Appendix to Pari II. 

less observer only a view of a rough stone here or a misshapen gargoyle there, 
reveals its true proportions only to the slow and careful survey that sees it 
from all sides, and, passing over details, grasps the final meaning of the whole. 
There is much that seems trivial and ugly and meaningless and repulsive in 
Li'a'i'cs of Grass when viewed only in detail. These things, however, have 
their place. Without them the poem would not be complete. Without them 
it would lack the universality hinteil at in the name, Leaves of Grass. . . . 

There is another sort of descriptive poetry in which the poet, instead of 
setting definite objects before your sight, works by creating in you the feelings 
that naturally accompany certain situations. It is a method that is nowhere 
mentioned in books of rhetoric, but it is precisely analogous to the method of 
lieethoven and the grand masters of symphonic music. Their music is not 
descriptive in the sense of cataloguing scenes and events, but produces upon 
the mind of the listener directly the impression which such scenes and events 
would necessarily produce. 

Of this sort of subjective and descriptive poetry Leaves of Grass contains 
frequent examples. Here is one : 

Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest. 

Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight. 

Toss, sparkles of day and dusk — toss on the black stems that decay in the muck, 

Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs. 

There are few definite points given in these lines which attract the eye. 
There is really no feature given us, but only a vague mystery of hinteil color, 
and yet you at once recogni/.e tlie feeling it calls into being as that which 
belongs to a moonlight night spent in the dejith of a lonely forest. 

And again, take these lines that hint of a midsummer's night. They describe 
nothing, but they perfectly express tlie physical pleasure that we feel when 
kissed by the warm and wandering night winds : 

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, 
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. 

Press close bare-bosom'd night — press close magnetic nourishing nightl 
Night of south winds — night of the large icw stars ! 
Still nodding night — mad naked summer night. 

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth ! 

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! 

Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains misty topt! 

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue ! 

Do you say that this is meaningless when each phrase is taken as a distinct 
st.Ttement ? So is the Seventh Symphony meaningless if you try to translate 
it bar by Ixir. I claim, ho\\ ever, that in these verses Walt Whitman follows 
the method of the tone poets, and that what you call vagueness and obscurity 
is simply the art of the musician, the only art that transcends the art of the 
poet. 

From a A'ofice in 187J. 

The history of the gradual development of Walt Whitman's poems is sig- 
nificant, almost geologic. The author having formed his [ilan, commenced 
carrying it out by his first book at the age of thirty-live years — " in perfect 
health, hoping to cease not till death." Upon and around this nucleus-volume 
of 1855 have since been steadily formed gradual accretions, published in 1857, 
in i860, in 1867, and lastly in 1S72 — each part of these accretions designed 
strictly with reference to its relative fitness as a whole — "the completed vol- 
ume being best understood," as has been said, " when viewed as such a series 
of growths, or strata, rising out from a settled foundation or centre." 



Idealism of Leaves of Grass. 2 1 1 

There is probiiWy no analogous case in the history of literature where the result of a pro- 
found urtiMic |)l;ui or conception — first laiiiichccl forth, and liricfly, yet snfficicnlly cxenipli- 
li<-d, .IS in Ihc sin:ill voliniie of the l.td-nes of 1855, taking for foini<l:ilion M.cri in lii'. fcihiess 
of Mood, power, iiniativcness, health, pliysiqiie, and as standing in the midst ofllie olijectivc 
worlil— a plan so steadily a<llicred lo, yel so audaciously ,ind freely huilt out of and upon, and 
wiili such ejjic consistency, after that start of iSss, devclop(-d in '57, '60, and W;, in sncccn- 
sive moral, esthetic, ;iiid religious sl.iges, each at)si*irl)ing the i)revious ones, but stridinjj on 
fir ahead of theiri — gra<liially made more and more emotional, me'lilativc, and patriotic — 
vilali/ed, heated to almost unbearahle fervency hy the author's personal oarl in the war, 
composing his songs of it in actual contact with its subjects, on Ihe very field, or surroiuidej 
by ihe wounded " after the hallb: brouglit in" — chanting undisinayerl the slrong chani of llic 
I iiseparable Union, amid Ihe vehement crises and stormy ilangers of the period ; and so grad- 
n.illy arriving at the cmnpleted book of 1H71-,!, anil crowning all it) it with the electric and 
solemn iioems of death and immortality — has so justified, and beyond measure ju.lificd, itH 
first amljilious plan and promise. — John liurrout;lis' s NoTHS. 

'I'lic bottk is ific song of Idealism. Underneath every pajje lurks the con- 
viction that all we fancy we see, may be hut apparitions — and that 

" 'J'hc real Something haH yet to be known." 

Its scope and purpose are, therefore, hy no means merely intellectual, or 
iii)a;.^inative or esthetic. Using the term in its late t and larj^est, and wA at 
.'ill in its doomntic and scholastic sense, Wait Whitman's jxietry is, in its in- 
Xiuihin, p/ii/(i.s(i/>/iir. It is beyond the moral law, anrl will jirobably therefore 
always apjjal m.iny. The moral law, it is true, is presetit, penetrating every 
verse, like shafts (jf li^^ht. Hut the- whole 'relentless kosnjos <jul lA which 
come monsters and crime and the inexhaustilile (.jerms of all the heat of sex, 
and all the lawless rut and arrogant greed of the universe, and especially of 
the htimnn race, are also there. Strange antl paradoxical are these pages. 
They accejit and celebrate Nature in absolute failh. Then, as over and out 
of some unbftunded sea of ttirmoil, and whirl and hi.ss of stormy waves, hur- 
rying and ttimijling anrl chaotic — whicli they largely are— still, by attempts, 
indications at least, rise voices, sounds of the mightiest strengih and gladdest 
hope yet given to man, with undismayed, unfaltering faith in destiny and life. 

The history of the book, thus considered, not only resembles and tallies, in certain respects, 
the development of the great System of Idealistic Philosophy in (^ermanyj by the "illus- 
trious four" — except that the development uf Lea7ies 0/ Crass has been carried on within the 
regif>n of a single minfl, — but it is to be demonstrated, by study and comp.irison, that the 
itainc theory uK the essential identity of the spiritual and the material wi;rlds, the shows of 
Nature, the progress of civilization, the play of passions, the human intellect, and the rela- 
tions between it and the concrete universe, which Kant prepared the way for, and Kichic, 
Schelling, and Hegel have given expression and statement in their system of tr.inscendentai 
Metaphysics. — this author has, with etpial entirety, expressed and stated in Leaijex 0/ (rrast, 
from a poet's point of view — singing afresh, out of it, the song of the visible and invisible 
worlds — renewing, reconstructinj^, consistently with the modern genius, and deeper and 
wider than ever, the promises of immortality — endowing the elements of faith and pri<le with 
a vigor anil ensrmhle before unknown — and furnishing to the measureless audience of human- 
ity the only great Imaginative Work it yet possesses, in which the objective universe and 
Man, his soul, are observed and outlined, and the theory of Human Personality and Char- 
acter projectefl, from the interior and hidden, but absolute background, of that magnificent 
System. — yohn liurroughs;' s Notes. 

It will always remain, however, impossible to clearly and fully state eilhcr 
tlie theory of Walt Whitman's composition, or describe his poeiTis, its results. 
They may be absorbed out of themselves, but only after many perusals, 'i'hey 
are elusive anrl puzzling, like their model. Nature, and form, in fact, a. prrson, 
perhaps a spiri/, more titan a book. They read clearest tCte-Mete, and in the 
o|)i-n air, or by the sea, or f)n the mountains, or in one's own room, alone, at 
night. They are to be inhaled like perfumes, and felt like the magnetism of 
a presence. They re(|uire affinity in the tastes and fpialities of the render. 
There is, mainly, tlint in them akin to concrete objects, the earth, the animals, 
storms, the actual sunrise or sunset, and not to the usual fine writing or im- 
agery of poems. Yet their subject is not abstract or irrational Nature, but 



212 Appendix to Part II. 

livinj:;, heart-beating humanity, witli nil its interests and aspirations, its sad- 
ness anil its joy. 

It is to be added that tlic whole work, as it now stands, the result of the 
several accretions, singularly hinges on the late Secession war. 

In the " Contemporary Review," for December, 1S75, there was a long and 
elaborate article l)y I'eter Bayne on " Walt Whitman's poems," written, evi- 
dently, after some study of Leaves of Grass. I know nothing myself about 
this Peter Kayne, and I am w-iliing to believe that he is an able and conscien- 
tious man. According to him Walt Whitman has almost every ipiality that a 
writer ought not to have, and not a single one that a man must have to be a 
poet. He says: " If I ever saw anything in print that deserved to be charac- 
terized as atrociously bad, it is the poetry of Walt Whitman." He says that 
those who praise this poetry " appear to me to be playing off on the public a 
well-intentioned, probably good-humored, but really cruel hoax." 

Mr. Bayne finds Leaves of Grass " inflated," " wordy," " foolish," its origin- 
ality is a " knack," a "trick." The poems are "extravagant," "paradoxical," 
" hyperbolical," " nonsensical," " indecent," " insane," " dull," " irremedica- 
bly vile," " nauseous drivel," full of " extravagant conceit " and " idiocy." 
In them Walt Whitman "mumbles truisms," talks "pretentious twaddle." 
Leaves of Grass abounds with " the thoughts of other men spoiled by oljtuse- 
ness," it is " inhumanly insolent," "self-contradictory," " venomously malig- 
nant," " mawkish." About the middle of his article he announces that Walt 
Whitman " is a demonstrated quack." He might one would think have been 
content to stop there, but he goes on to say that Leaves of Grass is " void of 
significance," "brainless," " a poor piece of mannerism," " wTCtchedly work- 
ed," "rant and rubbish," a "jingle," "linguistic silliness," "verbiage," 
" hopelessly bad writing." In a somewhat long article these com]3limenlary 
terms are used over and over and over again, so that, by the time we finish 
reading it, Mr. Bayne does not leave us in any doubt as to //is opinion of 
Leaves of Grass and of its author. But in case such doubt should remain in 
the reader's mind, he closes his review as follows; 

" This is the political philosophy of bedlam, unchained in these ages chiefly 
through tiic influence of Rousseau, which has blasted the hopes of freedom 
wherever it has had the chance, and which must be chained up again, with 
ineffable contemjit, if the self-government of nations is to mean anytiung else 
than the death and putrescence of civilization. Incajiable of true j)oetical 
originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the 
shrewdness to stick to it. As a Yankee phenomenon, to be good-humorcdiy 
laughed at, and to receive that moderate pecuniary remuneration which nature 
allows to vivacious quacks, he would have been in his place ; but when influen- 
tial critics introduce him to the English public as a great poet, the thing becomes 
too serious for a joke. While reading Whitman in the recollection of what 
has been said of him by those gentlemen, I realized with bitter painfulness 
how deadly is the peril that our literature may pass into conditions of horrible 
disease, the raging flame of fever taking the place of natural heat, the raving 



Poets* Tributes. 213 

of delirium superseding the enthusiasm of poetical imagination, the distortions 
of titanic spasms caricaturing the movements, dance-like and music-measured, 
of harmonious strength." 

From Joaquin Miller'' s Washington Lecture, 1876. 
Here in this high capital, there was once a colossal mind ; an old, and an 
honorable old man, with a soul as grand as ilomer's — the Mdton of Ani'jrica. 
Jle walked these streets for years, a plain, brave old man, who was kind even 
to your dogs. He had done great service, in an humljle way, in the army; 
he had written great books, which had been translated in all tongues and read 
in every land save his own. In consideration thereof he was given a little 
place under the Government, where he could barely earn bread enough for 
himself and his old mother. He went up and down, at work here for years. 
You mocked at him when you saw him. At last, stricken with palsy, he left 
the place, leaning upon his staff, to go away and die. I saw him but the 
other day, dying, destitute. Grand old Walt Whitman ! Even now he looks 
like a 'iitan god! iJon't tell me that a man gives all his youth and all his 
years in the pursuit of art, enduring poverty in the face of scorn, for nothing. 
That man shall live! He shall live when yon mighty dome of your Capitol 
no longer lifts its rounded shoulders against the circles of time. No, no! 
We laugh too much. We laugh at each other; we laugh at art; we laugh at 
men whom we have placed in exalted positions. We caricature great and 
good men, and disgrace only ourselves. We laugh at old men and old 
women. If ever I grow old I shall go to Europe, that I may be respected in 
my age. We laugh at religion and we laugh at love. There is no reverence 
in us; we are a race of clowns. 

LEONARD WHEELER TO WALT WHITMAN. 
O pure heart singer of the human frame 

Divine, whose poesy disdains control 

Of slavish bonds ! each poem is a soul, 
Incarnate tjorn of thee, and given thy name. 
Thy genius is unshackled as a flame 

That sunward soars, the central light its goal; 

Thy thoughts are lightnings, and thy numbers roll 
In Nature's thunders that put art to shame. 

Exalter of the land that gave thee birth. 
Though she insult thy grand gray years with wrong 

Of infamy, foul-branding thee with scars 

Of felon-hate, still shaft thou be on earth 
Revered, and in Fame's firmament of song 

Thy name shall blaze among the eternal stars ! 

The London "Daily News," March 13, 1876, had published a long and 
eloquent letter from Robert Buchanan, about W. W., who was then lying 
very ill and very poor, at Camden. Mr. B.'s letter aroused a general and 
exciting volley of journalistic and editorial comments, both in Great Britain 
and America. There were several Atlantic cable telegrams or "messages" 
exchanged by newspapers on the subject. Certain New York writers resented 
R. B.'s accusations — attacking Leaves of Grass and its author in a furious 
style. The following is a sample : 



214 Appendix to Part II. 

Frovi " Apph-toit's Journal,'' April ist, 1S76. 
{Extract.) 

The conclusion here arrived at, that Whitman, in his literary life and 

methods, is a mere trickster, is verified by his history. There was nothing 
peculiar about his early career. Belonging to a respectable family of farmers 
on Long Island, he went to school like other boys. When he grew to be a 
young man, lie taught school like many other young men. When the cele- 
brated hard-cider and coon-skin political campaign stirred up the community 
in 1S48, Whitman was drawn into it, and spouteil democracy from the stump, 
as it is very common for young men to do in the country. Waxing ambitious, 
and wishing to escape democratic labor in the country, he came to New York 
to get a living by his wits. Well introduced by political acquaintance, he 
took to the business of writing for newspapers and magazines. He wrote 
stories, essays, and articles of all sorts that he could sell. He got access to 
the " Democratic Review," then the leading literary periodical of New 
York, edited by Hon. J. L. O'Sullivan. His contributions to this magazine 
from 1840 to 1850, signed " Walter Whitman," appear among those of Whit- 
tier, Poe, Brownson, Hawthorne, Tuckcrman, Curtis, Godwin, and Taylor. 
They are decorous, jejune, and commonplace, contrasting strongly with the 
general quality of the magazine, and deserving no attention, tiiey attracted 
none. Whitman also wrote for the Sunday papers and the tlaily press — 
turning his hand to anything he could get, and, if we are not mistaken, when 
the Washingtonian movement rose he availed himself of the excitement, and 
wrote a temperance novel. He was, moreover, a pleasant gentleman, of 
agreeable address, and went into society as well attired as his precarious 
resources would allow. In short he was an entirely respectable person, with 
nothing marked about him, and meeting with a dubious success due to moder- 
ate ability, ipialified by excessive indolence. 

Such was Whitman's " foreground." He had a dozen or fifteen years' ex- 
perience of practical literature and miscellaneous journalism in the metropolis, 
with every opportunity to win a jiosition and make himself known if he had 
been capable of it. But Whitman had an ambition, born of egregious vanity, 
and he was not content with the obscurity from which he had been unable to 
escape in the open competitions of literature. Correctly concluding that it 
was of no use to pursue that tack longer, and determined to became a marked 
man somehow, he resolved to change his tactics. If he could not win fame, 
he would have notoriety; if the critics would not recognize him, he must find 
people that would. But, whatever may have been his ratiocination in the 
case, he changed his manner of life, and took to consorting with loafers. 
Donning a tarpaulin, blouse, and red fiannel shirt, conspicuously open, he 
snubbed conventionalities, clambered on the outside of the omnibuses, culti- 
vated the drivers, and soon became a hero among the roughs. Sauntering 
leisurely along the thoroughfares and lingering at show-windows in his jaunty, 
uncouth costume, with a quiet air of defying the world, he soon attracted at- 
tention, and began to be talked of and inquired about. He thus got recog- 
nition as " Walt Whitman," patron and pride of the ruder elements of so- 
ciety. 

Coincident with this external transformation there was an internal change 
equally marked. He made a strike in literature from his new standpoint. 
He had been scribbling away for years to no purpose, and at last he charged 
his old carbine with smut to the very muzzle, let drive, and brought down the 
first of American thinkers at the first shot. More literally, he issued a " pome," 
so called in his new vernacular, entitled Leaves of Grass. Mr. Whitman had 



Arran Leigh, England. 215 

never been celebrated ; he had found nobody to celebrate him, and so the first 
words of his new book were, " I celebrate myself." It was a performance of 
unparalleled audacity. In total contrast with all that he had ever done be- 
fore, it was an outrage upon decency, and not fit to be seen in any respectable 
house. Impudent and ridiculous as tlie book was, it would not have been 
easy to get it ijcfore the public, but accident and the author's cunning favored 
him. lie sent a copy to Mr. Emerson, who returned a very Haltering, but 
probably hasty private note, not dreaming ihat any public use would be made 
of it. Walt printed it at once, and the weight of Emerson's name sent ihe 
book straightway into circulation. Then peojjle made pilgrimages to see the 
extraordinary man with the curious aspect that had made such an astonishing 
book, and of whom nobody had ever heard before; and the notion was spread 
that he was the original genius of Nature itself, unwarped by culture, un- 
spoiled by society, careless of conventions, because dwelling far above them 
in the realm of his own sublime individuality. The external evidence thus 
coincides with Mr. Bayne's analysis of Whitman's writings in showing tiiat 
they are but an affectation and a pretence. Those may believe who will 
that when he entered upon the role of loafer, dressed up accordingly, vul- 
garized his name, and wrote a book filled with drivel and indecency, Mr. 
Whitman suddenly became tlie inspired poet of democracy, and, as Swin- 
Vjurne says, " the greatest of American voices;" but against sucii a view com- 
mon-sense protests. If his English devotees wish to testify their ap];reciation 
of Whitman's life and labors in a substantial way, let them quietly remit their 
sovereigns and do so. But let us be spared their insulting telegrams. The 
less publicity they give to their proceedings the better. 

ARRAN LEIGH (ENGLAND) TO WALT WHITMAN. 

" /, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin, 
Hoping to cease nut till death." — Chants Jjemockatic. 

They say that thou art sick, art growing old, 

Thou Poet of unconquerable health. 

With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth 
Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold; 
The never-blenching eyes, that did behold 

Life's fair and foul, with measureless content, 

And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent 
Over the dying soldier in the fold 

Of thy large comrade love: — then fjroke the tear! 
War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss. 

Have brought old age to thee; yet. Master, now. 
Cease not thy song to us ; lest we should miss 

A death-chant of indomitable cheer. 

Blown as a gale from God; — Oh, sing it thou ! 

From the Camden, N. y., "New Republic" April jst, 1876. 

Some idiot, or worse (undoubtedly worse), has an editorial piece in the 
New York " Tribune," 30th inst., telling how, years since, a family of four 
children lived on the salary of a clerkship in the U. .S. Attorney General's 
office — which clerkship, at the instance of the "authors of Washington," 
with Mr. E. C. Stedman at "the head" of them, was taken away from the 
sustenance of the four children, and bestowed on (of all themen in the world !) 
Walt Whitman! If this story is intended as a joke, the fun of it is too deep 



2l6 Appendix to Part IF. 

to he fathomable. Fortunately for tlio " autliors of Wasbini^ton " ninl llic 
gentleman at "the head" of them, it is so entire ami absolute a fiilsehoinl 
that it transeends the standard even of that niagnitieent Distriel. We hope, 
for the sanity of "the head " aforesaid, that he had nothing- to do with start- 
ing so small and dirty a fietion. 

LaUr. — Since the above, appears a special card from Mr. Slednian (see 
"Tribune," 3l^t), fully exonerating that gentleman himself, ami placing liim 
in a perfectly candid and honorable attituile in the matter, as, indeed, was to 
be expecteil, to be consistent with his whole life. 

But who, or rather ti-//,?/, has been writing the big and little editorials* that 
have appeared in the " Tribune" during the past week ? Whitman's works, 
now linished — and his life now near its close — are beginning to claim serious 
judgment. The points involved are the deepest in nationality, art, literature, 
lias the " Tribune " nothing to offer but these frivolous slurs, hardly up to the 
level of the Hash papers? or to invent shameless and petty personal items? 
or to reprint the foppish venom and aristocratic sputter of the " Saturday 
Review " ? 

From the ''Camctcn Post;' March 2gth, 1S77. 

Walt Whitman. — Hk visits New York after five years' absence — 
High-tone SOCIETY now takes him to its hosom — Vet he rides again 
atop of the Broaowav Omniuuses and fraternizes with drivers and 
BOATMEN. — After an absence and sickness of nearly five years, says a New 
York paper of March 2Sth, 1877, the " old gray poet" has returned tempora- 
rily to his 

Mast-henim'd Manh.-ittan, 

and, in moderation, has been all the past month visiting, riding, receiving, and 
jaunting in and about the city, and, in good-natured response to jiressuie, has 
even apjiearcd two or three times in brief, ofi-hantl public speeches. 

Mr. Whitman, at present near his lifty-ninth birth-day, is better in health 
and appearance than at any time since his paralytic attack at Washington in 
1873. Passing through many grave experiences since that period, he still 
remains tall and stout, with the same florid face, with his great masses of hair 
and beard whiter than ever. Costumed in his usual entire suit of English gray, 
• with loose sack-coat and trousers, broad shirt-collar open at the neck and 
guiltless of tie, he has, through the month, been the recipient and centre of 
social gatherings, parlors, club meetings, lunches, dinners, and even dress 
receptions — all of which he has taken w ith steady good nature, coolness, 
and moderation. 

As he sat on the platform of the Liberal Club on Friday night last he looked 
like an old Quaker, especially as, in response to the suggestion of the President, 
and sitting near a window-draught, he unhesitatingly jnit on his old white 
broadbrim, and wore it the whole evening. In answer to pressing requests, 
however, toward the close, he rose to let the audience see him more fully, and, 
doffing his hat, smilingly said, in response to calls for a sjieech, that he " must 
decline to take any other part than listener, as he knew nothing of the subject 
under debate (blue glass), and would not add to the general stock of mis- 
information." 

At the full-dress reception of the Portfolio .ind Palette Clubs on the Fifth 
Avenue, a few nights previous, as he slowly crossed the room to withdraw, he 
was saluted by a markedly peculiar murmur of applause, from a crowded au- 

* They were written by the late Bayard Taylor. 



A Tourisfs Interview — 1877. 217 

flience of the most cultured and elegant society of New York, including most 
of tlie artists of the city. It was a singularly spontaneous and caressin;;\.^'r,\l\- 
riionial, joined in heartily by the ladies, and the old man's checks, a-, he hob- 
bled along through the kindly applause and smiles, showed a deep flush of 
gratified feeling. 

Mr. Whitman has been the guest, most of the month, of Mr. and Mrs. John- 
ston, of 113 Kast Tenth .Street, whose parlors have been thrown open orj two 
special occasions for informal public receptions in compliment to him, which 
were crowded, happy, and brilliant to the highest degree. 

Nearly every fair day Mr. Whitman has exj^lored the city and neighbor- 
hood, often as near as jjossible after the fashion of old times. Again he has 
taken rides up and down iiroadway on to[> of the J'ifth Avenue and Twenty- 
third Street omnibuses, and talked with his old chums, the drivers, receiving 
incessant salutes of raised hands as he passed and was recognize'l. Ife has 
been over to Brooklyn and taken the unsurj^assed views again from the hilLs 
of Kort (jreene, and ocean vistas from i'rospect Park. Again, too, he has 
lingered for several trips up in the pilot-house, crossing Fulton ferry, conferring 
with his old comrades the pilots and deck hands. Again he has dwelt long 
on the picturesqueness, beauty, and unequalled show of our waters and bay. 

Walt Whitman will finish his fifty-eighlh year on the coming 31st May, that 
being his birth-day. Physically, his jjaralysis is still uncured, and he has 
serious stomachic trouble, and bad lameness, but he gets around quite a good 
deal, keeps always excellent sjjirits, believes thoroughly not only in the future 
world, but the present, and especially in our American part of it. 

A foreign tourist and interviewer, under date of March 30th, 1877, writes: 
I have to-day, with two companions, just visited Walt Whitman, at Camden, 
New Jersey, and had a good talk with him. He takes the late linglish whirl- 
wind about him and his writings very quietly. I am convinced he really cares 
nothing for popular or literary incense — views things mainly, I shf>uld say, 
from his own stand|><>int, and is, as the world goes, a queer, proud man. 
That he is poor fwhich he really is), that the American publishers won't pub- 
lish him, that the magazines reject his MSS., that the bards of fame here 
ignore him, and that all the big poetic collection-books leave him out in the 
cold, are facts which I believe in my soul he is far more proud of than put 
out by. He has a clear gray eye, and his manners, though a little haughty 
^nA pent, combine, with entire self-possession, a wonderful warmth and mag- 
netism. The only bitterness that escaped him was alxjut the persistent em- 
bezzlement and theft, during his illness and helplessness of the last three 
years, by his agents (they sold for him on commission 1 of the deeply-needed 
income due from his New York book-sales, " which, Ifjrtunately," he added 
in a dry tone, " were not so large, either." He is permanently paralyzed, 
walks only a little, sometimes hardly at all, and suffers from a chronic affec- 
tion of the stomach ; but keeps up, and often gets on the river here, the Dela- 
ware, and over to Philarlelphia. On my speaking of the .Secession war, and at the 
request of one of our party, a lady, he read his poem of " The Wound-Dres- 
ser." (I have felt disposed since to fasten that name upon him.) Whitman 
is tall, middling heavy in build of body, with a large head and red face, very 
plentiful hair and beard (white as snow), talks neither much nor little, and 
with a strong and musical voice. Finally, I think the old fellow the most 
human being I have ever met. 

19 



2i8 Appe?idix to Part II. 

Letter from Greenock, Scotland, iSyg. 

I first became acquainted with Leaves of Grass four years ago (when I was 
twenty two years of age) through Rossetti's book of selections. Previously 
I had been famdiar with Carlyle, and then with Goethe, and then with the prose 
and verse of Emerson. But it was more than all these my own deep expe- 
rience that prepared me for receiving Walt Whitman's writings with instant 
and passionate acceptance. I shall never forget my sensations on reading 
certain parts of the prose preface to the [first] Leai'es of Grass. I said again 
and again, " Here the universal mother herself is speaking," — for example, in 
regard to pride and sympathy, " Neither can stretch too far while it stretches 
in company with the other." Then I found it said of the " greatest poet," 
" He is indiflerent which chance happens, and which possible contingency of 
fortune or misfortune." It was as if 1 had heard speaking the very inmost 
spirit of Christ, and for the next few weeks I remember I was quite feverish 
w ith joy, and no wonder, for I then for the first time saw clearly. By degrees 
I saw what is called evil to be but immaturity, and I saw the immortal beauty 
of the laws of pain. I did not, at that time, dwell much upon the thought 
of immortality, and had not yet penetrated to Walt Whitman's conception of 
it, but my faith was without cloud ; I knew I had " Come well, and should go 
well." I saw that one cannot possibly lose anything, for I saw that every 
condition is profitable and blessed. I saw how great it is to be subject to the 
eternal laws even when they maim or break us. I saw that heroism is reached 
when one is able to see and say triumphantly at any possible worst, " Yes, I 
may be broken, but the law that breaks me is righteous and immortal." 
Walt Whitman seemed to have bidden the cosmos lie close upon me that it 
might enter into me at every pore. It seemed that he had taken me by wild 
and rejoicing seas and hills, and transformed me from a doubter and despairer 
into a piece of nature capable of strength and joy. Since I have known Leaves 
of Grass, books, mere reading, is less important to me than formerly. I like 
best to be out in the open air, and among men and women (old and young) and 
children, and animals, and when I ask myself whether others can possibly feel 
the same delight in living that I do, I am constantly reminded -that life and 
death might have seemed less great to me (and to how many, many more 
throughout the world) but for Walt Whitman. 

JOAQUIN MILLER TO WALT WHITMAN. 

O Titan soul, ascend your starry steep, 

On golden stair, to gods and storied men ! 

Ascend ! nor care where thy traducers creep. 

For what may well be said of prophets, when 

A world that's wicked comes to call them good ? 

Ascend and sing ! As kings of thought who stood 
On stormy heights, and held far lights to men, 

Stand thou, and shout above the tumbled roar, 

Lest brave ships drive and break against the shore. 

W'hat though thy sounding song be roughly set? 

Parnassus' self is rough ! Give thou the thought, 
The golden ore, the gems that few forget; 

In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought. 
Stand thou alone, and fixed as destiny, 

An imaged god that lifts above all hate ; 



Frank IV. Walters, England. 219 

Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate; 
Stand thou as stands the lightning-riven tree, 
That lords the cloven clouds of gray Yosemite. 

Yea, lone, sad soul, thy heights must be thy home; 

Thou sweetest lover! love shall climb to thee 
Like incense curling some cathedral dome, 

Fr[)m many di.'5tant vales. Yet thou shall be, 
O grand, sweet singer, to the end alone. 

But murmur not. The moon, the mighty spheres, 

Spin on alone through all the soundless years; 
Alone man comes on earth; he lives alone; 
Alone he turns to front the dark unknown. 

From "Papers for the Times'''' — by Frank W. Walters — January, 1880, 
London, England. 

At last, he for whom we looked is come. America has found voice. The 
teeming life of that wonderful New World has risen into song; the infant 
civilization can now boast a true-born poet of its own. If Greece had its 
Homer, if England had its Chaucer, so, now, America has brought forth the 
first-born of, we believe, a long line of glorious bards such as the world has 
never seen before. To some, who have only heard Walt Whitman's name, 
or only seen him laughed to scorn by reviewers who fail to understand him, 
our words will seem extravagant. To us who have read and re-read his poems 
with ever-increased delight, it seems impossible to express our sense of their 
power and beauty. Their power is sometimes overwhelming, and to read 
some of them produces an effect similar to that of gazing upon a tempest, 
listening to a hurricane, or watching the lightning. Their beauty and pathos 
now fill the soul with rapturous joy in the perfection of the world, and now 
plunge one into tears over the mysteries and sufferings of human life. These 
poems are .called Leaves of Grass ; and the title is excellent. They are one 
with Nature; they are not made, they^row/ they have all the characteristics 
of natural productions. This man wrote because the spirit moved him ; neces- 
sity was laid upon him ; his utterances pour forth from volcanic depths of 
soul. To read them is to come near to him. His personality electrifies you 
in every living sentence. He speaks to you, and speaks the very things you 
hsi\Qfe!t, but could not put into words. He interprets your soul to you. He 
takes you by the hand ;*you feel the beating of his pulse. He calls you his com- 
rade ; he puts his arms around you, takes you to his breast, and you feel the 
beating of his heart. He invites you forth with him to sound the depths and 
scale the heic^hts; and, with your hand in his, you go forth without fear, as 
under the protection of a strong elder brother. These poems are not part of 
the man, they are the man himself. They are the Incarnate Word in which 
he manifests the fulness of his manhood. Here is not merely the poet — here 
is the Man, through and through, from top to toe. He gives to you the un- 
speakable gift of himself— not merely his thoughts, but himself. You not only 
hear him, you see him; you not only see him, but you see through him; you 
not only see through him, but live in him ; he possesses you. 

And because this man has bursi the ornamental chains of rhyme and metre,, 
because his Leaves of Grass do not present a well-clipped lawn, because his 
wild flowers are not arranged into garden beds, because his intellectual growth 
is wild and rude as a primeval forest of his own America — there are some v.'ho 
would question his right to the title of poet. If V/alt Whitman is not a poet, 



220 AfptftJiv to Part II. 

all the worse for poetry. If your ilefmitiou of the poet will not admit tliis 
man into the sacred circle, then your definition needs revising. If these poems 
do not belong to what you call <;//. then your art is only <;/'//>". 7"<;/, it has lost 
its root in those ilepths of Nature out of wliich true art mu>t grow — its life is 
gone; and in its place a nobler art shall ri>e. and of this new kingdou\ of the 
beautiful, Whitman shall be the earliest proi^het, though he comes as a rude 
voice from the trackless wilderness, though he is clothoil in cantcl's hair and 
leathern girdle, and feeds his mighty vigor on locusts and wild honey. If 
Whitman be not a poet, yet he has done something more than write poen\s; 
he has shown us that the world is Goil's poem. He says he has listened to 
the Eternal \"oices, and they speak but one harmonious Truth. He has heard 
the tramp of the generations across the stage of time, and all the sounds rise 
into music. The clang of labor, tiie clash of battle, the shouts of joy, the 
groans of agony, the wailings of grief — o.\l these are varying passages in the 
Music of Humanity. 

We cannot wonder that Whitman lays tremendous emphasis on the body. 
Despised and counted unclean so long, it is time that we should proclaim, with 
unfaltering lips, the divinity of the tlesh. Men have been too reaily to take 
at its word the teaching of an emasculated pietism. They have said: "If 
this Body is utterly and hopelessly corrupt, then there is no use attempting to 
purify it. W'e will take it at the value you put on it. Its natural functions 
shall be regarded as shameful ; its appetites and passions shall seek tlieir fuhil- 
ment in dark places of the earth." N.ow, with all our heart, do we thank 
Wall Whitman for some of the poems which have been described as shame- 
less glorifications of the Flesh. Stttstioiis, indecil, they are, and that with a 
vengeance ; but however they may appear to others, to us they are never 
stnsual. No lustful mind need come to these severe pages thinking to gratify 
its morbid taste. We could mention books counted sacred, and novels 
reckoned polite, which will answer the vile purpose admirably — but not these 
Leaves of Grass. W'hitman's otTcnce (for so it is counted) is that he will 
sing the tc'/to/e Man — not only Soul, hut P^'dy too. 

It does seem to ns that this i-i teaching which we sadly need. It is similar 
to the teaching of Novalis — " When 1 lay my hand upon human flesh, I touch 
t'lod." It is the same as that tine doctrine of Paul — " Know ye not that yc 
are the Temple of God, and that the Spirit of Goil dwelleth in you ? If any 
man defile the Tenijile of God, him shall God destroy; tor the Temple of 
God is holy, whose temple ye are.'' Whitman emphasizes that Pauline <loc- 
trine. He says that the Hody is more than the Temple of indwelling; Spirit; 
to him the Body is the Livinh; GarmI'.NT of the Soul — Mind and Matter are 
inextricably bound up together — yea they arc but aspects of the one Manluxul. 
If we could impress this doctrine of the divinity of the Body upon the young 
men of the present day. in the next generation our civilization would be regen- 
erated, and a moral retormation would pass over our plague-stricken society 
with grander results than all the theological reformations of the past. 

He teaches the democracy of the soul; he -can discover the divinity of 
every human being. Democracy, "the purport and ann of all the past," is 
the right of every man to become all that he is capable of becoming. He will 
not deny that Christ is ilivine, but his allirmation embraces every member of 
the race to which Christ belongs. 

In regard to his religion in the depest sense it may be called the Religion 
of Humanity. He denies none of the faiths of the world, for all these grow 
out of the soul ; he accepts all Bibles, for these contain the great thcnights to 
which the Soul has given birth. On the questions of Ciod and Immortality 
he has some sphinx-like utterances. He refuses to argue about God, ami he 



Jaunt to the Rocky Mountains — \''''Tj. 221 

•ayu he needs no )o(mc to [.rove \\\ , hnmortalily. 'Ilx; Uioiis^ht of llic Infinite, 
the Kcnsc of an Klir(i;i) I'rcscncc (.ovin^^ {iro^/cz-i aixl ocrfctlion to l)i<; worhl, 
this to hirn is <;o'l. lie never cornplairw. 'I houfjfi he ha* fathomcl the 
depths of sin, and home a vicarious load of suffering.;, he yet declares th.il the 
world is perfect, that everythi/ig is in its place, that all events haj.pen in due 
order. In passionate optimism he affirms that /!// is Truth ; that if we could 
see far enouj.di and deep enough, all would appear very good, i'or the future 
he is at [jeace. 

We think we have «aid enough to prove that this American h'mi/i;r brinj;s u» 
a veritaMe (gospel — a f^ospel which transh^^ures Flesh into Spirit, change* 
mechanical duty into livinj^ impulse, and makes life rhythmic as the tides, 
j)ul ,:ili/ij; as tlie heart, movinj.^ in its orh like a star — a fjospel which reveaU 
'I ime's full atonement for all the sin and sufferinj/ of the world, which takes 
the darkness from mortality, and shows iJeath as a heauteoiis while rohed 
ari^el — a fiospel which haj/tizes our chan^jeful existence in»o one perfect anri 
ahidiii}.^ Life, and points for every soul to the vast heritage of immortal 
progress. 

/•ram the " Camden /'o;l" yunuary yth, jH8o. 

Wai.t Whitman Homk Aoain. — After an alwcnce since last August Walt 
Whitman returned yesterday to his home in Camden, from a long and varied 
journey throu;.;h the Central States of the Union. His travel has f^een mainly 
<levoted to Colorado, Kansas and Missouri, hut he has made visits to f'<ur or 
five other States. His ohjects of c-pecial attention have been the Kocky 
Mountains, the Creat I'lains, and the Mississij^j.i I<iver, with their life, scenery 
and idiosyncrasies. Of the West ^^enerally he says not the half has been told. 
He is in love with Denver City, and spcakS admiringly of Miss^juri and 
Indiana. 

f^oing and coming, largely by different routes and with side excursions, Mr. 
Whitman has travelled over 5000 miles. After some prc-tty rugged experiences, 
and a tedious fit of sickness, he returns to Camden in his average health, and 
with strength and spirits "good enough to be rnighty thankful for," as he ex- 
presses it. 



Trom the " Philadidphia f're::,'^ May 2fjlh, /880. 

To the Editor : — Your rejjort in to-day's paper of Colonel IngcrsoU's Tues- 
day evening's lecture, on " What .Shall I iJo to be Saved ? " is intersj^ersed 
every second or third |/aragraph with " Arnen from Walt Whitman," the jx>et's 
name aj^pearing in this manner in the lonj^ report and introduction some eight 
or ten times. It was at my invitation that Mr. Whitman went to the lecture, 
and I sat at his side throughout its delivery. He neither uttered the " Arnen " 
which the reporter puts so often in his mouth, nor once made any sign what- 
ever, either by voice or hand, of approval or disapproval, but maintained his 
usual undemonstrative manner throughout. fThe " Arnens" were uttered by 
a person immediately to the left of Mr. Whitman; the mistake was therefore 
a n;itural one.) 

While I am about it, would you give me room to correct " The Genesis of 
Walt Whitman " in " Apple-ton's Journal " — not the malignance and falv,-hood 
of the wlioie article, but a small specimen brick. The "Journal " speaks of 
Walt Whitman as habitually wearing, while living in New York, a red flannel 
shirt, a blou.se and a tarpaulin [lat. It doesn't seem to me to matter if he did; 



222 Appendix to Part 11^ 

but the fact is, he never in his life donned either of these articles. Whitman 
always dressed about the same as he does now. 

One might say that such mistakes are not important, and at all events get 
rectified in time. But they don"t ; they often make so-called history. Walt 
Whitman himself laughs at them as merely amusing, but they are painful to 
his friends, who are more in number than perhaps is generally suspected, and 
as one of these I write you this letter, which I hope you will have the kind- 
ness to insert. R. M. B. 

From " The Truthseeker^^ September, 1880. 

There are positively awful passages in praise of even the fiercest bodily 
passions — terrific shouts and cries for absolute abandonment to these. In 
some passages, this fierce outcry is changed for deliberate descriptions of 
equally appalling coolness ; and both are alike utterly amazing and unquot- 
able — absolutely unlike anything anywhere else in the English language. 
Few will be able to picture a world and a state of society in which all this 
could be anything but wild and brutal excess, to be forcibly repressed or vig- 
orously struck at and killed. Alas ! it is this that makes it impossible to put his 
complete writings into every one's hands. Taking the world as it is, it is all 
wrong; but it is not impossible to imagine a world, and a better world too, 
where it would be all right. The world as it is, is, and has to be, a world of 
restraints, delicacies, and reticences, as to the body and the body's functions ; 
but in a purer world there might be absolute openness, innocent unconscious- 
ness of uncleanness and wrong, and beautiful natural abandonment : and, 
though only the minority will see this, we believe that Walt Whitman belongs 
far more to that world than to this, where many of his utterances will be de- 
nounced as dangerous or even detestable : and dangerous perhaps they are. 
In a tremendous sense he realizes and carries out the divine word, — " What 
God hath cleansed, that call not thou unclean :" only he would say, — " What 
God hath created, that call not thou unclean." His glorification and mi- 
nute praise of the human body, and of every fibre and use of it, is simply 
overwhelming. 

He knows all the significance of his work, He says of the way to himself, 
" the way is suspicious, — the result uncertain, perhaps destructive." He does 
not beseech you to go with him ; rather he dissuades you : " Therefore release 
me now," he says. " Let go your hand from my shoulders. Put me down, 
and depart on your way." "Nor will my poems do good only," he says; 
" they will do just as much evil, perhaps more." Why, then, does he give 
forth these poems? He would say, — I cannot help it. The free birds sing: 
and I must speak — or die. His poems are the outbursting of his strong, free, 
boundlessly sensitive self. 

Mark well again, then, — he is the poet of a fresh, free, unbound, natural, 
ne\v-inade world, — the poet of the earth newly-turned-up, of the primeval 
woods newly explored, of wharves and docks and busy towns, and the strong 
flood of life all new and strange — nothing stale, flat, commonplace, familiar; 
in a word, the poet who is most like a child-man, opening his wide wonder- 
ing eyes, brimming over with joy, and feeling the mystery and beauty and de- 
light of bodily sensations in a world of boundless animation, vigor, and ever 
fresh surprise. 

Motto suggested by a lady for this Volume, from Tennyson's " Idyls." 

" Now I know thee, what thou art ; 

Thou art the highest, and most human too." 



1 88 1 — Visit to the Long Island Birthplace. 223 

From "The Long Islander,^^ August ^^th, i8Si. 

Walt Whitman in Huntington. — After more than forty years' absence, 
the author of Leaves of Grass, and founder of this paper, has been visiting 
our town the past week in company with Dr. R. M. Bucke, of London, Can- 
ada, who is engaged in writing a life of "the good gray Poet." They \ ut 
up at the Huntington House, and spent several days in calls and explorations 
at West Hills, on and around the old Whitman homestead and farm (now 
owned and occupied by Philo R. Place), and also down to the house where, 
in 1819, Walt was born (the farm now of Henry Jarvis), and the adjacent 
parts of the country for several miles. They were especially interested in the 
old Whitman burial hill and cemetery, contaming the poet's ancestors for 
many generations, dating more than two hundred years back, with its rows 
of ancient moss covered graves. The poet and Dr. Bucke also went over to 
the Van Velsor homestead, adjacent to Cold Spring, the birthplace of Mr. 
Whitman's mother, Louisa, daughter of Major Cornelius Van Velsor. The 
house, barn, and other buildings were all gone, and the ground ploughed over. 
But about a hundred rods off was the old Van Velsor burial ground, on a hill 
in the woods, and one of the most significant and picturesque spots of the kind 
it is possible to conceive. 

Mr. Whitman was called upon during his brief stay in Huntington by 
many old and some new friends, among others, the following: Charles Vel- 
sor, of Cold Spring; Benjamin Doty, of same place; in West Hills, Lemuel 
Carl], John Chichester, Miss Jane Rome, William May, and Samuel Scudder; 
in Huntington, Henry Lloyd, Lawyer Street, Albert Hopper, Smith Sammis, 
Thomas Rogers, John Fleet, Ezra Prime, Henry Sammis, Thomas Aitkins, 
Charles E. Shepard, Messrs. Wood and Rusco, and Fred Galow. 

LINN PORTER TO WALT WHITMAN. 

Hawthorne Rooms, Boston, April i^th, 1881. 
I knew there was an old, white-bearded seer 

Who dwelt amid the streets of Camden town; 

I had the volumes which his hand wrote down — 
The living evidence we love to hear 
Of one who walks reproachless, without fear. 

But when I saw that face, capped with its crown 

Of snow-white almond-buds, his high renown 
Faded to naught, and only did appear 

The calm old man, to whom his verses tell, 
All sounds were music, even as a child ; 

And then the sudden knowledge on me fell, 
For all the hours his fancies had beguiled. 

No verse had shown the Poet half so well 
As when he looked into my face and smiled. 

From the [Boston) "Literary World" December jd, 188 1. 

... I was very glad to read your notice of Whitman's stuff. The original 
Leaves of Grass is the dirtiest unsuppressed book ever published in this 
country. I should judge that the new edition has not been purified. — Cott- 
cord, Mass. 

... I want to tell you also how much I liked that notice of Walt Whit- 
man's Leaves of Grass in your last. It was the right thing to say, strongly 
and rightly said. — Newport, R. /. 



224 Appendix io Part IT. 

. . . You may be sure of the svnipatliy and thanks of most of your readers 
when you call a spade a spade, and give the right n.inu- to the indecency of 
Walt \Vlntnian. ... It is a comfort to t'lnd a newspaper, that has a reputa- 
tion for intelligence and honesty, willing to sjieak the plain truth. You did 
the same thing some months since of a book of Ileine'j-. ... 1 hope you will 
coniinue to remind your readei-s that no brilliancy of intellect can atone for a 
want of common decency. — Philadilfhia. 

From the " Boston Iltrah/;' Aj^ril iSth, iSSi. 

\Valt Whitman is now on his second visit to Boston. He came quietly, but 
he finds himself the subject of an ovation given with such hearty cordialness 
as to prove with what a real aflection he has come to be regarded. At about 
the time when the St. Botolph Club was organized, a few of the young fel- 
lows hajipening to speak of Lincoln, it was suggested by one of them that 
they ought to have Walt Whitman here to read his commemoration essay on 
the great President, a service that he reverently perlorms every year on the 
anniversary of Lincoln's death. The idea took root at once, and tlie arrange- 
ments were made that have resulted in the present occasion. It was a pleas- 
ant sight at the Hawthorne Rooms on Friday evening; the fme autlience rep- 
resenting the best side of Boston literary activity, and the poet, with venerable 
hair and bearil,but sturdy presence, reading his hne essay with the native elo- 
quence born of sincere feeling — just as if reading to a few personal friends — 
but with none of the tricks of the elocutionizing trade. 

He has been welcomed to Boston with open arms. Old and young, old 
friends and new, have gathered arouml him. The young men have taken to 
him as one with themselves, as one of tliose fresh natures that are ever youtii- 
ful ; the older ones, many of whom might once have been disposed to regard 
him with disfavor, now have grown to see the real core of the man in its 
soundness and sweetness, and are equally hearty in their welcome. " He is 
a grand old fellow " is everybody's verdict. Walt Whitman has in times past 
been, perhaps, more ignorantly than wilfully misunderstood, but time brings 
about its revenges, anil his present position goes to prove that, let a man be 
true to himself, however he defies the world, the world will come to respect 
him for his loyalty. Perhaps frankness may be said to be the keynote of Walt 
Whitman's nature. He glows with responsive cordiality. He is not afraid 
to be himself, and he asserts it with itleal American unconventionality, — that 
is, he is thoroughly individual in his personal ways and expressions, and all 
without offence to the individualism of others. He looks it in his strong fea- 
tures, full of the repose of force in reserve; his clear, friendly blue eyes, the 
open windows of a healthy brain ; the pleasant, sympathetic voice ; the easy 
suit of pleasant gray, and the open shirt with rolling collar; the broail, black 
felt hat contrasting with his white hair. All express the large-hearted, large- 
minded man. His rutldy face and powerful frame indicate gooil health, and 
it is only when he rises that one sees in his slow walk the invalid that he now 
is, — " a half-paralytic," he calls himself. He is hearty in speaking of his con- 
temporaries, and he thinks America is to be esteemed fortunate in having felt 
the influence of four such clean, pure and hcaltliful natures as lunerson, Jhyant, 
Whittier, and Longfellow. As his frank comments on others are without re- 
serve, so his free talk of himself is without egotism, as can well be the case 
with a man of such large personality. 

^^'hen in Washington, he was astonished to receive a letter from Tennyson, 
wonderfully cordial and hearty, inviting him to come to see him in England, 
and full of friendly interest. It was not so much about his book as it was a 



" Whenever the i^th of April comes." 225 

IKTSonal tribute, which seemed the more amazing coming from Tennyson, 
who never goes out of his way, even for kings. This was the beginning 
of a group of devotc-d admirers in England, and, until recently, the poet lias 
received the most of his sujjport (rom the Jiritish isles, where he has sold the 
greater number of his books. 

One of the late->t articles on Walt Whitman was that of Stedman's in a 
recent number of " Scribner's." It is an appreciative and fine feeling paper, 
full of friendly recogniiion. In parts, however, it seems as if he failed to 
grasp the true significance of his subject. He makes, for instance, a most 
mistaken comparison between Whitman and William Blake. Whitman, in 
fact, had probably never heard of William IJlake until Stedman's article ap- 
peared. And it seems difficult, indeed, to find any similarity between the 
grand healthiness of Whitman and the morbid, diseased thoughts of the half- 
crazy Englishman. Regarding Stedman's characterization of certain pas- 
sages in Whitman's poems as false to art, since Nature was not to be seen in 
her nakedness, for she always took care to cover up her naked places with 
vegetation, a great poet said to the writer that there were times when Nature 
was to be seen when she was in all her nakedness, and that it was proper that 
she should thus be seen ; a great artist could so present her, and thereby there 
would be no violation of the laws of art. Concerning these passages, Walt 
Whitman says that, after much thinking it over, he feels that he was right in 
writing them, and that he would not have them otherwise. There is some- 
thing way back of logic, back of reason, that prompjts us, and this feeling 
tells him that he was right. 

From the Philadelphia "Pro^ress,^^ April joth, 1881. 

Walt Whitman's latk Lkctukk in Boston. — There is a mixture of 
pensiveness, fitness, and of his own individuality — perhaps obstinacy — in 
Walt Whitman's determination to keep in his own way every recurrence of 
the anniversary of I'resident Lincoln's death. "Oft as the rollingyears bring 
back this hour," he said in his discourse last week in Boston, "let it again, 
however briefly, be dwelt upon; for my own part, I ho])e and intend, till my 
own dying day, whenever the 14th or 15th of April comes, to annually gather 
a few friends, and hold its tragic reminiscence." 

Twice before has he read his notes on this theme; once, in 1879, in New 
York city, and in 1880 in I'hiladelphia. This time it was in Bo'-ton, where 
he had been invitcl by the young journalists, artists, and by the St. Botolph 
Club. The old " Evening Traveller" of next day, April i6th, 1881, in an 
editorial leader thus describes the speaker and the speech : 

" There was a theme for poet or j)ainter in the scene at the Hawthorne Rooms 
last evening, when Walt Whitman read to a fascinated group of auditors his 
reflections upon the death of Abraham Lincoln. As he entered, unattended 
and unannounced, and made his way painfully along the narrow aisle, sup- 
ported by his stout stick, to the desk behind which looked out the face of the 
martyr President, and sitting in the broad oaken armchair, his clear, resonant 
voice fillin-^ every part of the room, the venerable prophet of Democracy pre- 
sented a pictures'^iue figure. He was clad in his customary suit of light gray, 
his fresh and striking countenance set off by waves of snow-white hair and 
beard, the ' copious blanchness ' of his linen adding yet another element to the 
cha-te simplicity of his attire; while in the audience before him were many 
eminent in art and letters, who had come to pay homage to one who is already 
fnst being regarded as the typical citizen of the republic. There was some- 
thing of poetic justice, too, in thinking of the reception of this man who had 



226 Appendix to Part II. 

been scorned as a barbarian rhymester, whose burning lines, surcharged with 
the future, had long fallen unheeded upon the indifferent ears of his country- 
men, and whose very presence was now felt almost as a benediction. 

" The scenes in that mighty drama which those present were gathered to 
commemorate were painted by Whitman in a series of bold, masterly strokes. 
The great incidents leading up to the culminating tragedy were swiftly enu- 
merated ; then the scenes of that wild and eventful April night, in clear-cut, 
well-chosen words, every epithet bearing its weight of meaning; and then the 
speaker went on in prophetic strains to foretell the significance of this great 
event, and its influence upon the art, history, and literature of the nation. 
The lecture closed with the recitation by the author of his grandly pathetic 
lament, ' O Captain, my Captain,' the lines gaining new grandeur and pathos 
as they came from his lips. 

" It was a scene which those present will long remember as pregnant with 
meaning to their whole after lives." 



From the "Boston Globe," August 24th, 188 r. 

In a small inner room connected with the printing establishment of Rand, 
Avery & Co., Walt Whitman, the poet, was reading by a table yesterday. 
Near by was a pile of corrected proof-sheets bearing the heading Leaves of 
Grass. His ruddy features were almost concealed by his white hair and 
beard. When he laid down his book on the intrusion of the writer, his eye, 
still bright and keen, glowed with a genuine good nature. No, he had no 
objections to entering into a conversation which should be given to the public, 
provided there was any interest in what he might say. He was here, he said, 
to look over the proofs of his new Leaves of Grass, which James R. Osgood 
& Co. are to issue. 

" It is a long time," remarked the reporter, " since the book by that name 
was first given to the world." " Yes," replied the poet, leaning back com- 
fortably in his chair, and looking reflectively across the table at the writer, 
who had seated himself opposite, " it is now, I believe, twenty-six years since 
I began to work upon the structure ; and this edition will complete the design 
which I had in my mind when I began to write. The whole affair is like one 
of those old architectural edifices, some of which were hundreds of years 
building, and the designer of which has the whole idea in his mind from the 
first. His plans are pretty ambitious, and, as means or time permits, he adds 
part after part, perhaps at quite wide intervals. To a casual observer it looks 
in the course of its construction odd enough. Only after the whole is com- 
pleted, one catches the idea which inspired the designer, in whose mind the 
relation of each part to the whole had existed al! along. That is the way it 
has been with my book. It has been twenty-six years building. There have 
been seven different hitches at it. Seven different times have parts of the 
edifice been constructed, — sometimes in Brooklyn, sometimes in Washington, 
sometimes in Boston, and at other places. The book has been built partially 
in every part of the United States; and this edition is the completed edifice. 

" Then I do not know whether it will appear to the casual reader, but to 
myself my whole book turns on the Secession War. I desired to make it the 
poem of the War — not in a way in which the old war poems, such as the 
' Iliad,' were war poems, but in entirely a new way. This came to me after 
the second part was composed, and has readily fused in with the other parts 
of my plan, and even dominated them." 



" Three Figures for Posterity.'^ 227 

From the Springfield [Mass.] "Republican^'' November loth, 1881. 
It wc.s a great age, men will say hereafter, and a grand country, that could 
produce in one generation three figures for posterity to gaze on, like John 

Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman — men unlike each other and 
unlike all others, such as no other land produced or could produce ; embodied 
heroism, embodied sense and sensibility, embodied imagination. So I 
view the three men, in the mass of their character — not considering the loose 
and trivial details which to many eyes have seemed to be the whole character. 
If it were possible to see the genius of a great people throwing itself now into 
tills form, now into thatt— as the prairie wheatfield takes the quick shape of 
the passing wind — it would be just to say that we had seen this mystery in 
the " plain heroic magnitude of mind " with which Brown met death, — in the 
broad and patient wisdom of Lincoln, — and in the immense landscape of 
Whitman's teeming imagination. His Leaves of Grass, as he has now pub- 
lished them, complete the vast picture of his mind, and bring out not merely 
the confusion of details, which we could only see at first by the light of 
poetic flashes — but the broad unity of the piece. It is as if the ancient sea- 
men had found their ocean-god slumbering along his shores, and upon near 
view could only see a hand here, an eyebrow there, a floating mass of beard 
elsewhere — but when they stood back from the strand, or best if they climbed 
a hill of prospect, the symmetry and articulation of the mighty frame plainly 
appeared, and they knew by sight their unconscious divinity, Neptune. 

There is in Whitman's verse, more than in any other modern poet's, what 
Keats called "that large utterance of the early gods" — an indistinct grandeur 
of expression not yet moulded to the melody of Shakespeare, Lucretius, and 
/Eschylus, but like what Keats again calls " the overwhelming voice of huge 
Enceladus." 

• It is when he speaks of Lincoln and the Civil War that Whitman is least 
indistinct. And no other of our poets — no, nor all of them together — has 
so well caught and rendered the spirit of that struggle as he has done it. 

From the "New York Tribtme" November igth, 188 1. 
After the dilettante indelicacies of William H. Mallock and Oscar Wilde, 
we are presented with the slop-bucket of Walt W^hitman. The celebrity of 
this phenomenal poet bears a curious disproportion to the circulation of his 
writings. Until now, it cannot be said that his verses have ever been published 
at all. They have been printed irregularly and read behind the door. They 
have been vaunted extravagantly by a band of extravagant disciples ; and the 
possessors of the books have kept them locked up from the family. Some have 
valued them for the barbaric " yawp," which seems to them the note of a new, 
vigorous, democratic, American school of literature ; some for the fragments 
of real poetry floating in the turbid mass; some for the nastiness and animal 
insensibility to shame which entitle a great many of the poems to a dubious 
reputation as curiosities. Now that they are thrust into our faces at the book- 
stalls there must be a re-examination of the myth of the Good Gray Poet. It 
seems to us that there is no need at this late day to consider Mr. Whitman's 
claims to the immortality of genius. That he is a poet most of us frankly 
admit. His merits have been set forth many times, and at great length, and 
if the world has erred materially in its judgment of them the error has been 
a lazy and unquestioning acquiescence in some of the extreme demands of his 
vociferous partisans. The chief question raised by this publication is whe- 
ther anybody — even a poet — ought to take off his trousers in tlic market-place. 
Of late years we believe that Mr. Whitman has not chosen to be so shocking 



228 Appendix to Part IT. 

as he \va<; when he had his notoriety to make, ami many of liis admirers — the 
rational ones — hoiK'd that the Lt-i}7'c-s of Grass would be wcedeil before he set 
them out ay;ain. lUit this has not been done : and indeeil Mr. Whitman could 
hardly do it without falsifying the first prineiple of his philosojihy, which is a 
belief in his own jierfection, ami the seciiml prineiple, which is a belief in 
the preciousness of tilth. " Divine am 1," he cries, "Divine am 1 inside 
and out, and I make holy whatever 1 touch or am touched from. The scent of 
these armpits aroma liner than prayer, 'This heail more than churches, Bibles, 
and all the creeds." He knows tliat he is "august." lie does not care for 
anybody's opinion. He is 

W.iU Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, 

Tiiihulcnt, fleshy, sensual, eating, ttrinkinj;, and l)reciIinK, 

No sentimontulist, no stamlcr above men anil women or apart from them, 

No mjie ni.ilcst tlian immoilcst. 

There is nothing in the universe better than Walt Whitman. That is the 
burilen of the '' Song of Myself," which tills fifty p;iges of the present 
volume : 

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me, and all so Uiscions. 

Nothing is obscene or indecent to him. It is his mission to shout the for- 
bidden voices, to tear the veil ofT everything, to clarify and transfigure all that 
is dirty and vile, to proclaim that garbage is just as gooil as nectar if you are 
only lusty enough to think so. His immotlcsty is free from glamour of every 
sort. Neither amatory sentiment nor susceptibility to physical beauty appears 
to have anything to do with it. It is entirely bestial ; and in this respect we 
know nothing in literature which can be compared with it. Walt Whitman, 
despising what lie calls conventionalism, ami vaunting the athletic democracy, 
asks to be accepted as the mister of a new poetical school, fresh, free, stal- 
wart, " immense in passion, pulse, and power," the embodiment of the spirit 
of vigorous America. 15ut the gross materialism of his verses represents art 
in its last degradation rather than its rude infancy. 

From the "Boston Transcript I''' 
Now when every legitimate leaf of grass is looking its freshest and green- 
est, the sun of adversity seems to have wilted — permanently, let us hope — 
those "leaves" which twenty-five years ago spri)uted from our literary soil 
under the auspices of Walt Whitman. The attorney-general of the Common- 
wealth notified the publishers of Lea'.'es of Grass that certain changes must be 
matle in the contents of the book, or its sale must cease. The publishers 
manifest perfect willingness to accede to the demand, but the author stubbornly 
refuses to omit a word or change a line. A great many people who know 
nothing about the book will wonder at Whitman's refusal to re-edit it, but to 
tell the honest, shameful truth, the very portions objected to are all that have 
made the book sell. It is now nearly thirty years since Whitman uttered his 
literary "yawp." It was at a peculiar period in American literature. None 
of our great i)oets had then developed their full strength. There was a lack 
of that brawny, unconventional vigor in American poetry which the jiopular 
mind yearned for, and which was felt by right to belong to it. The very 
audacity and lawlessness of Leaves of Grass did for the moment what no 
amount of merit could have done, and many enthusiastic critics saw in it 
promises of the coming man. In England the volume was received as a 
work of special insiiiralion by the jire-Raphaeliles, and an edition was 
brought out by Rossetti in lS68. An Irisli critic demanded for the author a 
]ilace by the si4e of /Kschylus, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, intimating 
that he would not sutler by comparison with any one of the four. 



A Comment on the Suppression. 229 

From the Sprin^ield {Mass.) "Republicans^ May 2jd, 1882. 
Leitkr f-'ROM R. M. UacKK. 

I desire briefly to call your attention to the fact that in this country, which 
boasfr of its liherty, and especially of its free press, the publication of per- 
haps the best book which has so far been produced in it has jjeen stopjjed \)y 
lej^ai interference. I allude to the interdiction of the issue of Leaves of Grass 
by a notice serve'l upon James R. (Jsgood & Co., its jjublishers, by District 
Attorney Oliver Stevens in March last; which notice was to the effect that 
unless the issue of the book at once ceased the firm would be prosecuted "in 
pursuance of the public statutes respeciing obscene literature." 

It is not easy for me, who for the last sixteen years have made this book a 
constant comjjanion, and have received (as have so many others) unspeakable 
benefit from it, to speak of this action in terms of moderation; but I shall, 
nevertheless, try to do so. It seems, then, that this is the outcome of the 
boasted freedom of America toward the end of the nineteenth century, that 
the publication of a book, the most honest, pure, religious and moral, of this 
or of almost any other age, can be stopped, and is stopped by the law. That 
this could happen would be bad enough if the book were, for instance, com- 
parable to Byron's "Don Juan," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Fielding's 
"Tom Jones," or hundreds of other really great books of the same kind, 
which, though shunned by j^rudes, are the joy and delight of all the rest of 
the world. \i it were a book in which sensual jjleasures were pictured and 
praised for tlieir own sake, or in which some of the fundamental principles of 
morality were attacked, it would still be wrong, inexpedient, and contrary to the 
spirit of this age and country to suppress it by legal interference; for the 
Americans of this generation are, I take it, grown up men and women, and 
require no district attorney or other official to instruct them as to what books 
are, and what not, proi>er to be read, but are perfectly able to decide (each 
one of themj such matters for themselves. 

But Leaves of Grass does not stand in the same category with either the 
books mentioned or those alluded to, nor does it advocate acts or practices 
which are considered by any sane person to be immoral or wrong; the whole 
crime of its author is that lie believes in the grandeur and goodness of hu- 
manity in all its parts and relations; that he, being himself pure, sees that 
man is so in his essential nature, in spite of any and all ajjpearances to the 
contrary; that all his parts and all his functions are well made and divinely 
appointed ; that man, in fact, is the work of a wise and good God — not his 
head and hands, his eyesight and intellect merely, but also all the rest of his 
body and his instincts, including the sexual passion, and the organs and the 
acts by and through which this passion (forthe greatest of all ends) seeks and 
finds its gratification: 

The very head and front of (his) offending 
Hath this extent, no more. 

He simply, like Milton, "asserts (universal) providence, and y?/j/z/f^i the 
■ways of God to man,'" his crime being that, as he has absolute, not partial 
faith, so he justifies ali God's ways, not a selected few of them. 

If even, his intention being pure, he had so failed in the carrying of it out 
that while aiming to strengthen virtue the book unawares stimulated vice, it 
would then urdoul;tedly be a proper subject for hostile criticism, but not for the 
interference of the law, which in such a case could only be appealed to by per- 
sons who felt that the ends they sought could not be attained by reason. But it 
has not been and cannot be shown that the book is of the character supposed, 



230 Apl^cndix to Part II. 

for it was not only intended to eontain, but it does contain, no page, line, or 
word calculated to arouse or eai>al)le ol arousing; anv improper or inuuoral emo- 
tion whatever, but, on the contrarv, its invariable tendency is toward puritv in 
thougiil. word, and deed. Walt \\ hitman says, and rij^htly, that, " It" anythinjj 
is sacred the human body is sacred " (not part of the body, mind, but all ol^ it), 
ami as a lo!;ical deduction Ironi that proposition (which even (.)liver Stevens 
will hardly deny) he continues: 

my boily 1 I ilare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the 

parts of yon. 

1 believe the likes of you arc to stand and fall with the likes of the soul (and that they are 

the soul). 

He therefore j^oes on to praise in detail all the various jiarts, origans, and 
funciions of the body, and tiiis is done in an absolutely chaste manner. There 
is no make-believe about all this on the part of the poet ; all parts of the body 
are praiseworthy and admirable to him (as they ought to be to us all, for they 
are so in reality ), and l.tovt-s <>/" ihass, properly read, is to make us see the nni- 
verse in all its parts, including man, as he sees it, and feel toward it as he feels 
tow aril it, /. (•., to see and Ice! that the world and humanitv are not half Clod's 
work and half the devil's, but that the\- are all CJod's w ork. and all perfect ; that 
" not an inch or a particle of an inch is vile." 

If so to feel towaril and so to treat the earth and its inhabitants is a crime 
deserving the interference of the law, then (I say it in all reverence) the 
teaching of Christ was immoral, and the Pharisees had the best of the argu- 
ment, for this was the basis of all his teaching: *' These people and these 
things that you I'harisees think vile are not so in fact — these publicans, these 
prostitutes are the children of Ciod ; these acts that seem to you to need con- 
denuialiim and innuNhment, need instead jiity and forgiveness; these things 
that seem to you trivial anil worthless have an eternal and sublime signifi- 
cance, if you couKl only see it." Has the world learned the lesson ? (.Hight 
it no longer to be insisted upon? Are we all (now at last) good enough, wise 
enough ? Do we all fully realize the w hole granileur and beauty of the world 
and of man? Are our feelings towards these always and under all circum- 
stances what they should be? Arc tiny ci'cr ivhat tlicy shotilii be ? If man 
is already perfect, of course he wants no more teachers, so let us snjipress all 
books (ami all men too) that are above our own level; or, it being .iilmitted 
that man is not quite perfect, shall we say that he is not cajxible of ever being 
nearer so than he is at present, and that therefore all leaching iutenileil to 
elevate him is useless? If this is the case then certainly books like Lttivfs 
of Grass have no value. How ever, the point to be kcjit in view at jiresent is 
not so much the value or no value of this desjiised and interdicted book, but 
the question whether any honestly written book may, sim]ily because of the 
mention in it of things not usuallv talked about, be suppressed by any man 
who, jierhaps not unilerstanding it, hajipens not to like it. It is no use to seek 
to justify the sup|iression by saying that it was tITected by means of and in 
accordance with law, for the worst crimes ever connnitted, the burning of 
w itches, the butcheries of Jetfries, the execution of early Christians by pagans, 
and of later Christians by one another for religious error, yes, even the Cruci- 
fixion itself, were all legal. The question is not whether Oliver Stevens's 
act is legal, but whether it is right. The suppression (even for the moment) 
of Leaves of Grass is a serious matter from several points of view, but the 
general question involved in the act is f^ir more serious. But upo^i this point 
Oliver Stevens has now expressed his opinion : it remains to be seen what the 
American people will think of it. 



George Chaincy's Chicago Lecture. 231 

From the " Boston Herald,'^ May 28th, 1882. 

Suppressinp; Walt Whitman's poems is like [)uttin(; tlic Venus of Milo in 
petticoats. A few years a}^o a dealer in New iJedford was proseciittfl for cx- 
posinij a copy of the statuette of Narcissus in his window. 'I'his is prurient 
prudery. We expect it in untravelle<J country jieoi^le, hut city lawyers ouj^ht 
to kn<)V/ better. We presume it is n<A I;ist. -Attorney Stevens, or Atly.-(Jen. 
Marston, to whom the credit of this small Iji^'otry helonj^s, hut Anthony (Jom- 
slock, the narrow apostle of drapery. If Walt Whitman's poems are obscene, 
what shall be said for .Shakespeare, Montaigne, Swedenborg, and the Jiiblc? 
On what principle can "the good gray poet" be condemned, and these ex- 
alted ? It is reprjrtcd that Anth'jny Comstock has jfromised not to prosecute 
the classics " unless they are specially advertised." Such a glimpse of bigotry 
is enough to make one shudder. We regret that such facile legal lo'Ws were 
found in Massachusetts, and that the publishers did not have the c<jurage to 
stand a prosecution for the sake of truth and art, and truth in art. 

From the " Chiccif^o Herald,'' Octoher /6t/i, 1882. 

Mr. George Chainey, of Boston, delivered a lecture last evening in Hcrshcy 
Hall upon Walt Whitman's suj>jjressed bo'jk, Leaves of Grass. The audience 
was small and very apj^reciative. Mr. Chainey is a tall, round-shouldered, 
smooth-faced gentleman, with flowing black hair, very large dark eyes, 
and a strong tendency toward ejjigrammalic and jjoetic expression. lie ap- 
pears to be about forty years oM. lie said that Walt Whitman is [<re-eniinently 
the poet of to-day. I'erhaps he might more justly be called the poet of the future. 
No poet of our time has been so coldly received — and yet there is no heart 
that beats so responsive to the voice of humanity as that of Walt Whitman. 
The critics refused to acknowledge him a poet, because he failed to write 
according to any of their rules of rhyme. He read his lines in the book of 
Nature. To express one's thoughts musically is a most valuable gift, but it is 
necessary for the poet to have something to reveal. The heart of to-day seeks 
to express itself in its own way. Millions still wear the manacles u{ yesterday, 
but it is without enthusiasm. The devotees of the church are bound by a law 
which does not satisfy their desires. They preach a salvation from hell. 
What they preach is hell. Ijonrlage is hell ; freedom is heaven. Shakespeare 
was the Pacific Ocean of poetry; Whitman is the Atlantic. The one carries 
the freight of kings anrl queens, and the romance of the past; across the other 
come the steamshijjs of to-day's commerce. Other poets have sung of the pomps 
and romances of high life, but Walt Whitman has taken up the commonest 
things of earth, and shown their relation to the highest human life. To hirn all 
the bibles, religions, [philosophies of the past are as the grass of yesterday. 
They have fed the worhl, but are not food for the jjresent. All the first part of 
Leaves of Grass is taken up with this thought. If men and women would listen 
to the teachings of this true poet they would save themselves much pain and error. 
It is oar right to enjoy ourselves in our own way, provided we interfere with 
the rights of no other person. Whitman is as original in matter as in manner. 
He is the first poet of true Democracy. All through his book he pleads the 
cause of the despised and down-troflden. He demolishes all distinctions 
drawn by church and state. Walt Whitman cannot come to his own to-day 
because the church has preempted the land which he could profital^ly occupy. 
He can afford to wait until, as he says, there shall be no more priests. His 
idea of Democracy is different from that of the politicians. It means that the 
wise and strong are to use their wisdom and strength for the benefit of all. De- 



232 Appendix to Part IT. 

mocracy means equality of opportunity and iij;ht. Air, water ami land sIkhiKI 
he common to all under a w i.^e manaycmcni. Absolute po.sses.sii)n ol land 
will some day be looked at in the same liL;lit as absolute possession of men 
and women. Neither should to day be perniilted to put claims on to-morrow. 
It shi)uld be held a crime to bequeath fortunes to jierpetuate a political or reli- 
{;ious creed. Woman must become in law as sJie is in fact the equal of man 
bel\)re the true Democracy can be had. 

The lecturer read Whitman's poem addressed to a Common I'rostitutc, and 
said that on account of his jiublishin!^ that poem in his p.qier he was greatly 
annoyed by rosimaster 'lobey of Boston. He claims that the lines are 
pure and chaste when read underslandingly in connection with the whole 
book. For this charity of Whitman's toward all Magdalens he has been per- 
secuted in business and person, and classed with those who secretly corrupt 
the virtue of youth. He tinds it necessary to treat of sex. In wrilinjj; of this 
subject he uses some expressions which are objecteil to. He says that there 
have been two ways of treating these subjects, one the conventional method 
of absolute silence, the other in the vulgar words which come from masculine 
mouths. The speaker here intcrpolaleil a stmy of his first loss of faith in the 
purity of the Christian Church when he found himself in the company of three 
ministers who regalcil each other h)r an entire evening with snuitty stories. 
In camp-meeting while part of the preachers are tlunulering to better men 
than themselves to repent or be danuied, the others are regaling each other 
in this delicate fashion in the ])rivacy of their tents. 

In closing, the speaker said that there were some passages in Leaves of 
Grass which he had not and could not read to the audience, not because the 
poetry was iminne, InU because the miiuls of his hearers were in such a condi- 
tion that the poet's words would raise inqune thoughts. 

From the rtiiladclf'hia " Progress^'' November rr, rSS2. 

Wai.t Whitman's Lati'. Ii.i.nkss. — Dressed in a plain but handsome new 
suit of iron gray, all of a piece, loose ami old-fashioned, yet a certain ilasliy 
style of its own, " the poet of future Democracy," as Tlioreau once termed 
him— up again from his recent severe sickness — resumed, last week, his 
occasional mid-day saunters along v.'hestinit street. The whole rig, and the 
generous-crowned light hat of scift French beaver, that always surmounts its 
stalwart six-feet height, showed that free and large physique not unbecom- 
ingly. 

It is not generally known that Walt Whitman's frequent spells of paralysis 
and sickness, the last hflcen years, are legacies from his overstrained labors 
in the Secession War. Never was there a grander and more perfect physicpie 
than he threw into that contest in 1862, with all the ardor of his nature, and 
continued till 1865, not as the destroyer of life, but its saviour, as voliuiteer 
army mu'se and missionary, night and day, through the whole of three unin- 
termitted years, always tending the Southern woundeil just the same as the 
Northern. Well has it been claimed for him that behind his books stand the 
unrivalled deeds of his ]iersonal career. 

He told me last week that in the two Philadeljihia volumes just issued, the 
one comprising his entire poetic Leaz'es, and the other. Specimen Days, giving 
his autobiography and collected prose writings — both volumes printed solely 
under his own eye and direction — he has put himself on record for the future, 
"for good or bad, hit or miss," as he phrased it; and that he shall bother 
himself about the whole matter no further. 



" TJic Value of Whitman in Litcraltirc." 233 

William Sloane Kennedy, Massachusetts. {Excerpts). 

Walt Whitman is not a man who can be dcscribefi hy comparison or by 
antithesis. No genius can Ijc so flescribed. If you will j^ive nje an aflcfjuate 
account of a cubic mile of sea-water or blue ether, measure t)ie work of the 
sun, the beauty of the morninj^ star, or tiie influence of the starry mi(lni{.Mit 
ujjon the soul, then I will give you an adequate account of this man. lie is 
not immoral, but unmoral, as a faun or a satyr; a dynamic force, an aniniatc 
fragment of the universe, a destroyer of shams, a live fighter upon the stage 
(" im Ilintergrund wimmclt's v(jn gemaltcn Soldaten."). 

Don't go to hirii cxjjccling everylhing of him. lJ<m't expect to find an ar- 
tist. Don't ask for music. JJe satisfied with the grand thought, llie manly 
faith in democracy, the occasional majestic rhythm and jjoetry, the subtle 
spirituality, the anti'jue strength and fresh savagery, the handling of vast 
masses of matter and spanning of gulfs of space and time with an ease and 
sureness never exhibited by any other poet. If you are inclined to laugh at 
Whitman's weaknesses and absurdities, do so by all means; it is right that 
you should. But if you arc inclined to underrate his real strength, just at- 
temjjt to draw his bow, and see how ridicidoiis will be your failure. '1 here 
is not a man living who can write anything that will come within a thousand 
miles of such compositions as Whitman's " Song of Myself," "Crossing Brook- 
lyn Ferry," " Burial Hymn of Lincoln," " Calamus," " Kid6lons," his sea 
pieces, etc.; and no one but Carlyle could write such prose as the best of 
Whitman's. For my part, I desjjairof bemg able to completely analyze him, 
so revolutionary is he, so infinitely suggestive. A man, wlio, in his jjhiloso- 
phy, has oriented himself by the perihelion and aphelion of the earth's orbit; 
who has taken the parallax of stars sunken deej^ beyond the vision of others' 
eyes, and whose diameters of faith span all gulfs of despair, — this is one whom 
I can trust and respect, but can with difhculty fathom. 

It is the few men of tremendf>us native force of character, appearing at long 
intervals in history, that redeem literature from its va])idity and chaffiness. 
The value of Whitman in literature is, that in among the idiotic dandies and 
dolls of book characters he has placed A I.IVK MAN, with all his sins and cru- 
dities, his brawn and blood, sexuality and burliness, as well as his noble and 
refined fjualilies. The effect and the shock of this upon the morbid mental 
condition of the pojjular mintl of the day, is like that which would be i)ro- 
duced by sufhlenly producing a nude figure of Angelo's, or an undrapcd Bac- 
chus, in a ladies' sewing circle of a Methodist church. 

As the author of Leaves of Grass himself says, in his article in the "North 
American Review," for June, 1X82, the cosmical completeness of his work 
would have been injured by his omission to present the matter of sex. There 
is architectural yjroportion in the plan of his writings. As in antique sculp- 
ture all parts of the body are faithfully reproduced, so in Whitman's writings 
is all Nature reflected, and in j^roper proportion. Sexuality, fatherhood, and 
motherhood are themes which he treats only in two or three of liis earlier 
poems; and, unf|uestionably, they should have been sung by so universal a 
poet — only in a more delicate way. 

Let me close this topic by quoting the following passage from II. K. Ilaweis's 
excellent work on "Music and Morals:" " In some of the Gothic cathedrals we 
may have noticed strange figures hiding in nooks and comers, or obtrusively 
claiming attention as water-sjjouts. Some of them are revolting enough, but 
they are not to be severed from their connection with the whole building. 
That is the work of art; these are but the details, and only some of the details. 
How many statues are there in all those niches ? — let us say a thousand. You 

20 



234 Appendix to Part II. 

shall find seventy pure vir)^ins prayiri}^ in long robes, and forty monks and 
apostles and l)isli<)|)s, and aiij^cls in clioirs, and arclianfjcls staiidinfj liif^li and 
alone uj^on lofty fi(;ade and piimaele and tower ; and around the eorner of the 
roof shall be two devils prowling,', or a hideous-lookin}; villain in ^reat pain, 
or (as in Chester cathedral), there may be a proportion— a very small |)ro])or- 
tion — of obscene (i{,'ures, hdrd and true and ])itiless. ' What scandalous subjects 
f(jr church decoration !' scnne may exclaim; yet the whole im])ression prcjduced 
is a |)rofoundly moral one. The sculptor has j^iven you the life he saw ; but he 
has ^iveii it from a really hi^h standpoint, and all is moral because all is in 
healthy proportion. There is dcj^radalion, but there is also divine beauty ; 
there is passionate and des])airin|.; sin, but there is also calmness and victory; 
tliere are devils, but they are inlinitely outnumbered by angels; there lurks 
the blur of human depravity, but as we pass out beneath groups of long- 
robed saints in prayer the tlujught of sin lades out befoie a dream of divine 
I)urity and peace. We can see what the artist hjved and what he taught; 
that is the right test, and we may take any man's work as a whole, and apjdy 
that test fearlessly." 

And what a diction he has! Ili.s monosyllabic .Saxon e])ithets somehow 
liave imparted to them the crisp and crude freshness of the natural objects 
themselves to which they are ap])lied. And his style is by no means sponta- 
neous. I have pers(Hial knowledge that he has always kept in view the advice 
given by Heranger to a brother poet, namely, that he should kee|) clear of all 
hack writers, and study words, words, words. Whitman's wcjrds are alive. 
His pages snap and crackle with vitality. Like Homer, he gives us actions, 
and not descriptions of actions. .Something in the movement of his periods, 
like the blind resistless /r/cV^ of growing wood libre, the erratic and ponderous 
push of writhen oak knots. 

If there remains anything to be said it is this: Throw aside the present ar- 
ticle, and all articles about this great man, and go read his books. One result 
will be inevitable — you will discover your own limitations. 



From " 'J'lic I/enild" Boston, October i^th, 1SS2. 

TiiF. Prosk Wkitincs or Tine " CJooi) (jray Pokt." A Twin Volume 
TO <' Lkavks ok tiuASH." — Walt Whitman's new book, with the odd, but 
thoroughly characteristic and descriptive title. Specimen Days and Collect, is 
a ])rose companion to Leaves of Grass, being a complete collection of the 
author's [jrose writings, as the former C(jmprises all his verse. It is a meaty, 
compact volume, and is more directly comprehensible to the understanding 
of the multitude than the greater and more famcnis work. And yet tliis is as 
much Whitm:in as his verse is, and the same characteristics pervade it: grand 
hrallhiness of tone, largeness of view, universal reach, an<l, at the same time, 
delicate |)erce])tion and sensitiveness, and identity with Nature, indissoluble 
and knit through and through with its fabric. Had Leases of Grass never 
been written, this btxjk alone would be enough to establish the author's fame 
as a great poet. 

In a |)ersonal letter. Whitman writes: '« It is a great jumble (as man him- 
self is) — an aulobiograjjliy after its sort — (sort o' synonymous with Mon- 
taigne, and Rousseau's ' Confessions,' etc.) — is the gathering up and formula- 
tion and |)Utting in identity of the wayside iteini/ings, memoranda, and per- 
sonal notes (jf iifty years — a good deal helter-skelter, but, I am sure, with a 
certain sort of orbic coni])action and ontMK'ss as the final result. It dwells 
long on the Secession War, gives glimpses of that event's strange interiors. 



"An Autobiography after its sort." 235 

especially the army hospitals; in fact, makes the resuscitation and puttinf^ on 
record of the emotional aspect of the War of 1861-65 one of its jjrincipal 
features." 

IfKJeed, too much stress cannot he laid upon this latter phase of the hook. 
No history or descri)4ion of the war that has yet Ijeen written prohahly ^ives 
such vivid and };ra|)hic pictures of its events — its heroism, its horror, its sad- 
ness, the pathetic tenderness of countless of its incidents, and, ah(ive all, its 
grand significance. I'or this rc-ason it ou^ht to he dear to every soldier. 

During the years from 1873 totlie |jresent date, Whitman has heeii a partial 
paralytic. Very much of his days (and nights, also, it apjjearsj he has s|)ent 
in the open air down in the country in the woods and helds, and hy a secluded 
little New Jersey river. His memoranda, on the spot, of these days and 
nights, fill a goodly j>ortion of the volume. 

Then comes the " Collect," emljodying " Democratic Vistas," the nohle prose 
Preface to Leaver of Grass of the edition of 1855, and much other prose, to- 
gether with a number (^f ycjuthful efforts in jjrose and poetry, which, in a note, 
the author ex|jlains he would have j^referred to have them rpiietly <]t<>\A in 
oblivion, hut, to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue, he has, with 
some qualms, here tacked them on. 

'i"hc whole volume, in its arrangement, is pregnant with Whitman's person- 
ality, and it seems more a part of its author than jjaper and printers' ink usually 
do. It also exhibits, as far as ])Ossihle for any jjublic record, that most won- 
derful ^nd intricate of processes, the workings of a poet's mind, and affords 
an insight into the mysterious interior dejjlhs and rambling galleries and diain- 
bersof the cosmic s|jhere whose large and rugged exterior is clothed with the 
fresh beauty of " leaves of grass." 

Fro?n " The Press,'' Philadelphin, March 18th, /88j. 

Ralf)h Waldo Emerson's corrlial letter to Walt Whitman "at the beginning 
of a great career," has become familiar in American literature. Of scarcely 
less interest is Emerson's frank personal estimate of the new jioct in a letter 
written to Carlyle in 1856, when the flat, thin f|uarto was unknown to the 
general, or for that matter, to any reader. " f Jne bfjok came out last summer 
in New York," lunerson writes, " a nr)ndescrifjt monster, which yet had 
terrible eyes and bulfalo strength, and was indisputably American. It is called 
Leaves of Grass. After you have hooked into it, if you think, as you may, 
that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your 
pipe with it." 

It would not be easy to improve on this to-day as the transcription of a first 
impression. "Nondescript" and a "monster" Leaves of Grass unque.-^tion- 
ably was hy all literary canons with which either Carlyle or Emerson were 
familiar; but the keen critical spirit of the Concord philosojiher felt, rather 
than saw, the coming power looming great through the mist of forms strange 
and new in literature. I'"or the rest, the neat suggestion that Carlyle would 
be opaque to the new light is admirable. 

/•'roni the Sydney, Aitstralia, '■'■ Evening Ncws^'' March 21st, f88j. 

Amkkican I''REi;Tiiouf;HT AND Frkktiiinkkrs. — On Monday evening a 
crowfled audience assembled in the Masonic Hall to hear a lecture by Mr. 
Charles Brighton "American Frcethought and I'Veethinkers," Some fifteen 
months ago he took a trip to America for the benefit of his health, and he has 



2T,C) .1 />/<,■ fi,/i.v to Pixrt IT. 

rolurned to Sydney with a coiisiilorably auRmontccl knowloiljjo of tbo pvoj^rcss 
ot tliv>ui;lit in tin- ("iio.it l\opiil>lii-. Ho spoke foriu-arly two luuiis, iviui j^ave 
a iloal ol iutcicslini; inloiniatioii conccruiii};; the advauccil (hinkcis of (lie 
country, and the inlliionco thoy cxtMciso on tlio pro^jicss of ti>oii_i;hl in tlic 
direction of mental libcity. Of the many iVeethinkevs lie had met he ranked 
Walt Whitiniin, the poet, highest. Whitman was the j^randest and hest man 
in every sense, morally, intellectually, and i>hysically, he had ever met in his 
lile — a prophet imet. who was as far in atlvance of other writers and thinkers 
in the prcbcnt day as Isaiah ami Jeremiah were in advance of their contcm- 
IHJiarics. 

ROBERT HUCIIANAN TO WAI.T WHITMAN. 

I'totii " Facfs on the ll'ti//." 

I'vicnd Wliilman ! wert thou less serene and kind, 

Surelv tliou mij^htest (like the l?ard sublime, 
Scorned by a ^eiur.ition deaf and blind), 

Make thine apjieal to the aveiiLjer Timk; 

For thou art none of those who upward climb. 
Gathering;- roses with a vacant mind. 
Ne'er liave thy hands for jaded trillers twined 

Sick llowers oi rhetoric and weeds of rhyme. 
Nay, thine hath been a I'lophefs stormier fate. 
While Lincoln and the martyr'd lei^ions wait 

In the vet wideniuf; blue of yonder sky. 
On the ^reat strand below them thou art seen, 
Blessing, with si>methin|^ Christ-like in thy mien, 

A sea of turbulent lives, that break and die. 



Walt Whitman's Works 

POICMS AND PROSE — TWO VOLUP/IKS. 

LEAVES OF GRASS. 

COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUMP:. 

Comprises all the author's Poetical Works down to date, 1^83. 
Two hundred and ninety-three Poems. Includes all previous 
issues — the Brooklyn one, 1855 ; the New York, i856-'57 ; the 
Boston, i860; the (second; New York, 1866; the Washington, 
1871; the Camden, 1876 — and the Boston, 1881. Contains 
every page, line, and word attempted to be ofificially suppressed 
by Attorney-General Marston of Massachusetts, District Attor- 
ney Stevens of Boston, and (until countermanded by the Gov- 
ernment) excluded from the mails by U. S. Postmaster Tobey. 

Walt Whitman himself considers this Philadelphia edition — 
which has been printed under his own personal oversight, with 
final revision and touches — the only full and authentic collection 
of his Verse. 

A handsome i2mo. book, with characteristic Portrait of the 
Poet from life in Brooklyn, in 1856. 382 pages, best pajjcr and 
print, long primer type, cloth binding, gilt. 

Price $2:00. — Sent by mail to any address, post-paid, on 
receipt of price. 

DAVID McKAY, Publisher, 

23 SOUTH NINTH STREET, PHILADELPHIA. 

SPECIMEN DATS and COLLECT. 

COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 

A full Compendium of the author's Prose Writings, old and 
new. Gives Mr. Whitman's early days on Long Island and 
young manhood in New York city — copious War and Army Hos- 
pital memoranda {i'6()2-G-^) — convalescent Out-door Notes in 

(239) 



the country (iSyd-'Si) — literary Criticisms, including, at some 
length, an estimate of Carlyle — Jaunts over the Great Plains, 
and along the rivers St. Lawrence and Saguenay. 

The COLLECT includes "Democratic Vistas" and all his 
Political and Critical Writings, and youthful sketches. 

A handsome i2mo. Volume, with characteristic Portrait from 
life of Walt Whitman, in 1S79 374 pages, best paper and 
print, long primer type, cloth binding, gilt. A companion 
volume to the Poems. 

Price ^2.00. — Scut by mail to any address, post-paid, on 

receipt of price. 

DAVID McKAY, Publisher, 

23 SOUTH NINTH STREET, PHILADELPHIA. 

J8@= The three voKimes, Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and Dr. 
Bucke's Walt Whitman, will be supplied for Five Dollars. 



MAN'S MORAL NATURE. 

By RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE, M.D. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter I. 
Lines of Cleavage. 

Chapter II. 
The Moral Nature and its Limits. 

Chapter III. 
The Physical Basis of the Moral 
Nature. 

Chapter IV. 
Is the Moral Nature a Fixed Quan- 
tity? 



Chapter V. 



The History of the Development of 
the Moral Nature. 

Chapter VI. * 

The Inference to be drawn from the 
Development of the Moral Nature 
as to the Essential Fact of the 
Universe. 



Price $i.JO. 

Published by G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 
27 & 29 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET, NEW YORK. 
(240) 



